Yeah, it's an artifact.
The images have been adjusted to keep Mars stationary in the frame.
MEX is actually getting closer to the planet in each shot.

a new web article on monitoring of polar dust storms
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Sc...th_pole_of_Mars

including a very nice animation from the team in Bilbao

FYI, we've put up a short web article about it with input from the HRSC, OMEGA and VMC science teams

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Sc...n_curious_cloud

it includes this great image of it from HRSC
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/20...ud_21_September

there should be more VMC images of it coming over the next few weeks!

yeah its been like that for a while, the interface to the system in flight dynamics where the information is obtained from was changed

it should be working now.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/esa_marswebca...eposted-public/


ironically this is just in time for the web article about the first publication since VMC was upgraded to full science instrument status!
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Sc...altitude_clouds

its a milestone we're really proud of, congratulations to everyone on here who has contributed over the years, we wouldn't have gotten this far without you!
http://blogs.esa.int/vmc/2016/08/05/vmc-grows-up/


for those interested, the full paper is in the january edition of the journal icarus and is available here
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...1501?via%3Dihub

thanks for mentioning this, i've added the current flat field to the raw image archive.

http://blogs.esa.int/vmc/vmc-data-archive/

its at the bottom with the full year archives.

btw, if anyone fancies having a go at creating a new one, do feel free, we have a lot more images now than when the current one was made including some (like our ISON observations from october 2013 ) without Mars in it

hi,

just in case you haven't seen this,

we're running a program to offer schools the chance to image Mars using VMC at the end of May.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operatio...tary_spacecraft

http://blogs.esa.int/mex/2015/03/06/vmc-imaging-campaign/

Hi, VMC team here, its been a while.

We thought we'd give you an early Christmas present.

We have updated the VMC blog to now permit the downloading of the raw unprocessed images.

The entire VMC image archive is now downloadable in raw format.

http://blogs.esa.int/vmc/2014/12/17/access...-image-archive/


This will be now automatically populated along with the flickr page within a few hours of images arriving.
anyone following the @esamarswebcam twitter account then gets a tweet telling them new images are available.

we've also made single archives of a each years observations so those of you who want to get the full set don't have to spend ages downloading each observation individually.

and to launch this new setup we've been lucky enough to have taken these rather nice images of the Martian south pole on Monday morning!