Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)
On December 18, Mars will be the closest it has been in the last two years, reaching a distance of 55 million miles from Earth. This series of images was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on December 1-7, within two weeks of its December 2007 closest approach. Each image shows the planet rotating about 90 degrees from the next image. This gives astronomers a full-globe look at the Red Planet. [Top Left] - Mars on Dec. 1, 2007; longitude ~50 degrees [Top Right] - Mars on Dec. 3, 2007; longitude ~225 degrees [Bottom Left] - Mars on Dec. 3, 2007; longitude ~320 degrees [Bottom Right] - Mars on Dec. 7, 2007; longitude ~140 degrees