October 17, 2001
The same gravity that holds galaxies together and keeps planets in their orbits also held you to the Earth on the day you were born.
Mars Engulfed
Birthday · October 17, 2001
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published October 17, 2001. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
For months now, Mars has been engulfed by a great dust storm, the biggest seen raging across the Red Planet in decades. As a result, these two Hubble Space Telescope storm watch images from late June and early September offer dramatically contrasting views of the martian surface. At left, the onset of smaller "seed" storms can be seen near the Hellas basin (lower right edge of Mars) and the northern polar cap. A similar surface view at right, taken over two months later, shows the fully developed extent of the obscuring global dust storm. The storm is reported to be waning, but planet-wide effects such as the warming of the upper martian atmosphere and cooling of the surface are still being monitored daily by instruments on board the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The present condition of the martian atmosphere is also important to the aerobraking Mars Odyssey spacecraft, scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet next week.