Astronomy Picture of the Week – Mars as seen by Hubble
This is one of the best photos of Mars ever taken from Earth or Low Earth Orbit. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this close-up of the red planet Mars when it was just 88 million kilometers away. This color image was assembled from a series of exposures taken within 36 hours of the Mars closest approach with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Although better pictures of Mars have been taken by the various missions that have been sent to the red planet, this one is really exceptional considering the distance.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)
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Paul Tomaszewski
Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
One Comment
Michael
I agree with you, this is probably the best photos of Mars I’ve ever seen in my life (so nice that can’t be true ;-))