The Martian crescent, in bright white, appears extremely clear in this February 2007 image collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft. This is the first-ever photograph of its kind to reveal the Red Planet in this manner.
It was collected during one of the four flybys that Rosetta had to perform since launch, in order to enter the correct course that will take it towards a 2014 rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The latter will enter the inner solar system at that time, and will provide ESA with a chance to study the changes that these objects go through as they get closer to the Sun. Usually, these comets spend most of their time in the Oort Cloud, an agglomeration of icy bodies located beyond the Kuiper Belt.
The red colors in the image above are aberrations caused by light inside Rosetta's cameras. Though the Martian crescent may seem overexposed, the thin atmosphere around the planet can be seen at the 11 o'clock position.
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