MARS: Closest Encounter

Hubble's Closest View of Mars — August 27, 2003

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped this portrait of Mars within minutes of the planet's closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years. This image was made from a series of exposures taken between 5:35 a.m. and 6:20 a.m. EDT Aug. 27 with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary...

Mars oppositions Solar System diagram

Mars oppositions Solar System diagram without images

Hubble's Sharpest View of Mars — August 24, 2003

This view of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced Camera for Surveys provides the sharpest view of the red planet attainable by the Earth-oribiting observatory. The picture was taken August 24, when Mars was approximately 34.7 million miles from Earth. The central...

Mars: August 26, 2003 (Annotated)

The Two Faces of Mars

These two images, taken 11 hours apart with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveal two nearly opposite sides of Mars. Hubble snapped these photos as the red planet was making its closest approach to Earth in almost 60,000 years. Mars completed nearly one half a rotation between...

Hubble's Close Encounter with Mars — August 26, 2003

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this close-up of the red planet Mars when it was just 34,648,840 miles (55,760,220 km) away. This color image was assembled from a series of exposures taken between 6:20 p.m. and 7:12 p.m. EDT Aug. 26 with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary...

Mars: August 27, 2003 (Annotated)

Sharpest Ever Color View of Mars

This view of Mars, the sharpest photo ever taken from Earth, reveals small craters and other surface markings only about a dozen miles (a few tens of kilometers) across. (The spatial scale is 5 miles, or 8 kilometers per pixel). The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard...

Rotating Mars Globe

This globe of the planet Mars was assembled from three separate images of the red planet taken by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on August 24th, 26th, and 27th. The color composite images were mapped onto a globe, geometrically to create a...