Picture This

Hubble captures close-up view of the Red Planet

Bright, frosty polar caps, and clouds above a vivid, rust-coloured landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic seasonal planet in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view taken on 12 May 2016, when Mars was 50 million miles from Earth. The image reveals details as small as 20 to 30 miles across. On 30 May, Mars will be the closest it has been to Earth in 11 years.

Observing

Mars opposition 2016: Which side of the Red Planet is visible tonight?

On the morning of Sunday, 22 May planet Mars reached opposition in the constellation of Scorpius and is closest to the Earth on 30 May — its best showing in a decade for Southern Hemisphere observers. As seen from the UK the Red Planet will be low in the south at 1am BST, but on nights of good seeing surface detail will be visible in amateur telescopes. Use our interactive Mars Mapper to identify its features.

News

Evidence builds for ancient under-ice volcanoes on Mars

Volcanoes erupted beneath an ice sheet on Mars billions of years ago, far from any ice sheet on the Red Planet today, new evidence from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests. The research about these volcanoes helps show there was extensive ice on ancient Mars. Such an environment combining heat and moisture could have provided favourable conditions for microbial life.

News

Martian surface revealed in unprecedented detail

The surface of Mars — including the location of Beagle-2 — has been shown in unprecedented detail by University College London scientists using a revolutionary image stacking and matching technique. The UCL researchers used the Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR) process to reveal objects at a resolution up to five times greater than previously achieved.

Observing

See the Moon join Mars and Saturn in the morning sky

With just a month to go until the 2016 opposition of Mars, the Red Planet is now visible very low in the southeast before midnight for observers in the heart of the UK. Mars and ringed planet Saturn are presently separated by just over 7 degrees — a low power, wide-angle binocular field of view. The waning gibbous Moon passes by on the mornings of 25—26 April.

News

Swansong experiment sheds light on Venus’ polar atmosphere

Some of the final results sent back by ESA’s Venus Express before it plummeted down through the planet’s atmosphere have revealed it to be rippling with atmospheric waves and, at an average temperature of -157 °C, colder than anywhere on Earth. The aerobraking experiment has improved our knowledge of our planetary neighbour and holds great promise for ESA’s forthcoming ExoMars mission.

News

Early Mars bombardment likely enhanced its habitability

Much of the action on Mars occurred during a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment about 3.9 billion years ago. Large comets and asteroids raining down on the planet would have produced enough heat to melt subsurface ice, likely enhancing climate conditions enough to make Mars more conducive to life — at least for a time.

Observing

See comet 252P emerge in the UK predawn sky

When 252P/LINEAR passed just 14 lunar distances from Earth on 21 March, the comet was galloping across the far southern sky at a rate of almost ten degrees per day. Now rapidly heading north, 252P finally appears in the predawn UK sky. While moonlight will interfere with current observations, the comet is much brighter than predicted.