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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a rather incredible set of images of Saturn and Mars, revealing the beauty of the former and a storm engulfing the latter. The images were taken when the two planets were almost at opposition – their closest points to Earth. Saturn, snapped on June 6, was 2.2 billion kilometers (1.36 billion miles) from Earth.
Mars, seen on July 18, was
59.4 million kilometers (36.9 million miles) away. Saturn’s tilt, at 27 degrees
to its orbit, means we get different views of the planet on a decadal or so
cycle. At the moment we’ve got a pretty great view of it tilted towards us, as
seen by these Hubble images.
“Saturn has seasonal changes
caused by the planet’s 27-degree axial tilt,” said NASA. “With summer in the
northern hemisphere, the atmosphere is now more active. This may be responsible
for a string of bright clouds visible near the northern polar region that are
the remnants of a disintegrating storm. Small, mid-latitude puffs of clouds are
also visible.”
The view from Hubble is so
good that we can actually see Saturn’s famous hexagonal storm at its north
pole, which has been ever-present since it was first spotted by Voyager 1 on
its 1981 flyby of the gas giant.
Mostly, this Hubble view of
Saturn just shows us how magnificent the planet looks. It’s bright rings and
gorgeous clouds are beautifully resolved by the telescope. And in a video, we
can even see its clouds rotating around the planet.
Hubble’s view of Mars,
meanwhile, is oddly similar – the depths of the planet are also obscured by
cloud. Normally we should be able to see the surface, though, but the planet is
actually engulfed in a global dust storm right now, which has put NASA’s
Opportunity rover in a bit of a pickle.
“Each Martian year,
moderately large dust storms cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at
a time,” said NASA. “Global dust storms – lasting for weeks or months – tend to
happen during the spring and summer in the southern hemisphere, when Mars is
closest to the Sun and heating is at a maximum to generate winds.”
These Hubble observations
are useful, as they will let astronomers study the upper atmosphere of Mars,
while spacecraft in orbit can study how the storm behaves lower down in the
atmosphere. There’s still a lot we don’t know about dust storms on Mars,
although we did recently work out where the planet's dust mostly comes from.
Still, these Hubble snaps
should serve as a pretty good reminder of how great this orbiting telescope is.
Even from millions or billions of miles away, it can get views like this. Not
bad, NASA.
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