From NASA's Planetary Photojournal
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the space-based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet with its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 snapped images between April 27 and May 6,1999, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. This color composite is generated from data using three filters: blue (410 nanometers), green (502 nanometers), and red (673 nanometers).
This image is centered near a volcanic region known as Elysium. This area shows many small, dark markings that have been observed by the Hubble telescope and other spacecraft to change as a result of the movement of sand and dust across the Martian surface. In the upper left of this image, at high northern latitudes, a large chevron-shaped area of water ice clouds mark a storm front. Along the right limb, a large cloud system has formed around the Olympus Mons volcano.
Image Title: A Closer Hubble Encounter With Mars - Elysium
Catalog #: PIA01591
Target Name: Mars
Spacecraft: Hubble Space Telescope
Photo credits: Steve Lee (University of Colorado), Jim Bell (Cornell University), Mike Wolff (Space Science Institute), and NASA
Back to Mars photographs index.
Last Modified On: Monday, December 18, 2000