Recently, VMC has been busy looking out into the Solar System – imaging Phobos and Jupiter. But yesterday, the Mars Webcam returned to its nominal target. Mars.

In these latest images, we were at an altitude of around 9800 km above the planet, looking down on the northern pole.

Here, in one of the images we got back this morning, you can see we've captured not only a great shot of the polar cap but also (in the bottom of the image) we have Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, as well as what might to be cloud formations in the top right.

The full 28 image set (complete with what may be further cloud formations close to the pole) is available on our Flickr channel. The change in brightness from image to image is simply due to the the three different exposure settings that were used.

We have more VMC observations scheduled over the next few months and we'll post updates here on the blog and Flickr as we get them.