Oh, I do so love a scenic overview of a planet. Especially Mars.

Mars Express is a European Space Agency mission that launched in 2003 and entered orbit around the Red Planet seven months later. It was the first Mars probe ever attempted by ESA, and it was a resounding success; still active, it’s been monitoring the planet ever since. It takes images, uses radar to probe the subsurface, and has investigated the Martian atmosphere.

Its orbit is unusual. First, it’s a polar orbit, which means the spacecraft flies over both poles in a north/south direction, instead of the usual more equatorial orbit. The polar orbit means it can eventually view the whole planet as it circles above and Mars rotates underneath. The orbit is also highly elliptical, going from just 300 km above the surface to over 10,000 km. This means it can get close-up views as well as more panoramic wide-field views.

Andrea Luck is an image processor in Scotland, and he is extremely good at what he does. He takes images from space missions like Mars Express and reprocesses them, meaning he takes the raw images and reapplies color balance and such, combining them to create a single image.

On July 13, 2024, Mars Express was many thousands of kilometers from Mars when it took a series of snapshots that Luck cooked up into an image that, to be frank, shows a staggeringly mind-boggling view.

WHAT.

OK, there’s a lot to see here.

The whole planet wasn’t visible to the spacecraft from this altitude, so you see it as a cut off disk. The top portion is in shadow, so it’s twilight there. The rest is lit by daylight. The color was coded by Luck to approximate the true color of the planet. You can see many huge craters and other features.

What catches the eye, though, is the dark pebble seen in the foreground. That’s Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons. It’s only about 20 km across, and has an incredibly low orbit over the planet, circling at 9,300 km above the surface on average. It orbits faster than the planet spins, so if you were under it, near the equator, you’d see it rise in the west and set in the east!

Below Phobos, near the limb of the planet, is the immense shield volcano Olympus Mons, the largest known in the solar system. It’s 22 km high at the peak, well over twice as high as Mount Everest, and 600 km across. That’s as wide as Colorado.

You can also see a thin bluish smudge along the edge of Mars. That’s probably a layer of water ice cirrus clouds. There’s not much water in the atmosphere there — hell, there’s not much atmosphere there — but what water there is can be seen sometimes as ice clouds. You only see it off the edge because of the “soap bubble effect”, also called limb- or edge-brightening. You’re looking along the edge of the atmosphere, so you’re looking through more material, making it easier to spot. Photos of Earth taken from the ISS show the same sort of thing.

Luck used images taken with blue, green, and neutral density filters to make this image (the ND filter was mapped to red in the image). The motion of the spacecraft and Phobos meant the moon moved quite a bit between images, so he used the position of it in the blue filter to make the image, and in each of the other two frames covered it up using the data from the other frames. So, in the ND filter, he used the images from the blue and green to fill in where Phobos was in the ND image.

And if you like it—and you do—he has a huge 6k version you can download. It’s incredible. I am always amazed at just how ridiculously gorgeous our solar system is. There’s no bad place to look; every part of it is spectacular and more than worthy of not just our study and attention, but our desire to seek out beauty. It’s very much out there.

P.S. I found this image on Bluesky, where Luck and I follow each other. The social medium site is growing rapidly (some of Musk’s usual jackassery got Xitter banned in Brazil, so there was a huge burst of people moving to Bluesky over the weekend), and it’s taking the place of circa 2012 Twitter in my heart, when it was fun to be online. It has a lot of good trust and safety features Twitter never implemented, so it’s much better, and there’s no algorithm screwing with your timeline, so what you see is who you follow. A lot of astronomers, scientists, astrophotographers, and other fun folks are there. If you’re still on Twitter I STRONGLY suggest getting out of there and checking out Bluesky.

In BAN Issue 757, I wrote about NASA dumping the International Space Station into the Pacific Ocean sometime in the next few years. I mentioned that Russian Progress spacecraft give the station a reboost to a higher orbit ever few weeks, but somehow forgot to mention these reboosts have also been done by the Northrup Grumman Cygnus cargo ships as well. My apologies to the orbitheads for this oversight! My thanks to Adeena Mignona for pointing this out to me.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!