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Hubble Snaps A Stunning Close-Up Of Mars

This article is more than 7 years old.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an incredible close-up of the Red Planet, showing details as small as just 20 miles across.

The NASA/ESA space observatory snapped the picture on May 12, 2016, when Mars was 50 million miles from Earth.

This is a great month to view Mars as it draws closer to Earth, getting the nearest it’s been to us in 11 years on May 30, when it will be just 46.8 million miles away. Mars is also in opposition, with the Sun and the Red Planet on opposite sides of Earth, so the Sun is fully lighting up Mars as seen from Earth.

Mars’ elliptical orbit brings it close to Earth every two years or so, but the distance can range from 35 million to 63 million miles. This is because Mars takes almost twice as long as Earth to orbit the Sun, bringing it close to us every 26 months.

The image shows the planet’s bright, frosty polar caps and clouds whipping across its orange-red surface. On the right is one of the first features ever identified by seventeenth-century astronomers, Syrtis Major Planitia, which was used by Christiaan Huygens to measure the rotation rate of Mars. At the time, no-one knew what this dark region represented, but today, scientists know that it is an ancient, inactive shield volcano.

To the south of Syrtis Major is what appears to be a circular indent, which is actually the Hellas Planitia basin, formed 3.5 billion years ago by an asteroid impact.

But most of the picture is dominated by the orange Arabia Terra, a huge upland area that covers around 2,800 miles of the planet. Researchers believe that this is among the oldest terrains on the planet, dotted with craters and dried river canyons and heavily eroded by the wind.

Running along the equator, south of Arabia Terra in the image, are the long dark regions of Sinus Sabaeus and Sinus Meridiani. These areas feature fine-grained dark sand deposits from ancient lava flows and dark bedrock. All around the edge of the Red Planet and above its polar ice caps, wispy, hazy clouds can be seen.

Some of NASA’s early Mars missions landed here, including Viking 1 in 1976, Pathfinder in 1997 and the still-operational Opportunity rover. Spirit and Curiosity both landed on the opposite side of the planet.

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