New Hubble Portrait of Mars , Cloudy , Icy but Beautiful

The image was captured earlier this month and shows Mars just 50 million miles from Earth , the Northern Polar ice cap has receded and thin cloud hangs in the atmosphere.

An extended blanket of clouds can be seen over the southern polar cap. The icy northern polar cap has receded to a comparatively small size because it is now late summer in the northern hemisphere. Hubble photographed a wispy afternoon lateral cloud extending for at least 1,000 miles at mid-northern latitudes. Early morning clouds and haze extend along the western limb.

www.nasa.gov...


Hubble really is one of mankind's greatest achievements , from this image alone it's easy to see why Mars still holds its allure over many of us.

Link to image page

a reply to: gortex

Has it always looked like this or are we terraforming? Did some other package get carried to Mars with biological material for seeding?

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: bobs_uruncle

It's natural Mars, no intervention from us.

Kind of amazing to watch another planet with an atmosphere and weather, even though Mars atmosphere is thin.

It's the closest we get to another "Earth like planet", in our own solar system, and since we haven't found any outside our solar system other than possible exoplanets, the closest in our galaxy.

We shoulda been there by now.

OMG!

Our climate change is happen on mars, seesh it MUST be bad!


Joking aside thats a lovely pic, its how i imagined the red planet as a youngster. I think its nice when things like this meet childhood exceptions created from information and pictures from the time. Maybe the next super hubble will show our children pics of a guy waving at earth from the surface

For the record, the Very Large Telescope in Chile has 4 times the resolution of the Hubble Telescope (8 meters versus 2). Granted, it's not positioned in space to avoid atmospheric disturbances, but it manages to counter them using a sophisticated system of adaptive optics and interferometry.

VLT could probably produce a better image of Mars than the Hubble.

~~~

P.S. You can now officially call me the resident party-pooper!

that is cool , cant wait for The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to be put up there and receive its pictures , they say its 100 times better than HST

a reply to: Dr UAE

When it comes to infrared, the James Webb telescope will eclipse everything we've had so far and will have for the near future.

That's alright, Mr. Pooper. Do you have an image that is better? Please share

( Reply to Wildespace, on my phone)

a reply to: gortex

NASA sure has pulled out the stops in the treatment of these images. The blue is more vivid, the brown/red has more shades, even a little more blue to white of the clouds covering the brown surface and it could almost be looking at Earth with Africa peeking through. 'Only' missing in the illusion is the deep blue where there is no land, just water. Don't you just wish?

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: bobs_uruncle

It's natural Mars, no intervention from us.

How could you possibly know that?

You sound awfully sure considering there's absolutely no way you could know.

originally posted by: wildespace
a reply to: Dr UAE

When it comes to infrared, the James Webb telescope will eclipse everything we've had so far and will have for the near future.

Webb is not a replacement for Hubble is that its capabilities are not identical. Webb will primarily look at the Universe in the infrared, and in that, Hubble led the way for Webb, since Webb hopefully, will see much deeper and probably further into the infrared areas that are already an interest to NASA and astronomers in general because of Hubble.
That alone will keep a few generations busy I'm sure.

originally posted by: burgerbuddy
We shoulda been there by now.

What if we are?

a reply to: Urantia1111

How could you possibly know that?
You sound awfully sure considering there's absolutely no way you could know.

I am sure , it would be pointless to terraform Mars as it has lost most of its magnetic shield which is the reason it lost most of its atmosphere.
Add that to the fact that we couldn't terraform Mars even today let alone 40 / 50 years ago and that rules out terraforming as a possibility.

a reply to: gortex

Au Contrair. Just give us a couple of centuries.

a reply to: Phage

Suppose Star Trek has a decent track record of futurist predictions.

a reply to: gortex

I remember when the officials said that the Hubble could not image Mars or the Moon. Of course, they failed to mention that it used the same sort of mirrors and equipment that spy telescopes for earth observations had been utilizing for years earlier.

a reply to: Aliensun

I remember when the officials said that the Hubble could not image Mars or the Moon.

I don't remember that. In fact there are a couple of Hubble image of the Moon in an article from 2005.

Now, the U.S. is planning another pioneering journey, this time to the moon and beyond. To prepare, NASA scientists are using the Hubble Space Telescope to hunt for resources, such as oxygen, that are essential for people to survive and to sustain their existence on the lunar surface. Hubble's preliminary observations and results are promising.

www.nasa.gov...

Mars:1999


Or, to simplify:
heritage.stsci.edu...

a reply to: Aliensun

No-one has said you can't, it's just you can't get high resolution close ups with it. Using Hubble to get high resolution images of nearby objects is like trying to watch your living room TV through binoculars.