Comment 20 years late (Score 3, Interesting) 47
This is known as microlensing parallax, and was first done 1995. Parallax breaks lensing degeneracies, enabling the determination of distance,
Now, you may quibble about this particular distance measurement, but it's been done for 20 years now. Routinely. And, yes, its been done from space before too.
My guess is that some needed qualifiers were lost between the astronomer's mouth and the headline writers keyboard, but it ain't first.