A Dust Storm on Mars

Hubble snapped this picture of Mars on October 28, 2005, within a day of its closest approach to Earth on the night of October 29. The large regional dust storm appears as the brighter, redder, cloudy region in the middle of the planet's disk. This storm, which measures 930 miles (1,500 km) has been churning in the planet's equatorial regions for several weeks now, and it is likely responsible for the reddish, dusty haze and other dust clouds seen across this hemisphere of the planet. Hubble took this image when the Red Planet was 43 million miles (69 million km) from Earth. At the time, summer was approaching in the planet's southern hemisphere, resulting in a smaller than normal south polar ice cap, which had largely sublimated.