A gallery of the best images captured by the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) during testing and optimisation in 2007. The selection includes a crescent Mars, Mars' rotation and views of the Red Planet's 'volcano family' (we've also included a few images taken by the VMC in 2003).
As Mars orbits the Sun, Mars Express periodically enters eclipse seasons during which Mars and the Sun are in roughly the same direction as seen from the VMC - so the planet is a crescent and the Sun dominates the image (even though it's not in the field of view). In this picture, the bright burst of light is not actually the Sun, but a reflection from part of the spacecraft near the VMC. This casts lens flare artefacts across the image, just like when the Sun shines too brightly into the edge of a camera's lens on Earth. Looking past the artefacts though, a beautiful view of the crescent planet can be seen, with the glowing ring of the atmosphere lighting almost 270 degrees of the disc.
