This month, Mars has been more than ready for its close-up-and fortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope was ready as well, snapping pictures of the Red Planet during its orbital approach. If the skies are clear, you can have your own close encounter with Mars tonight - the closest encounter possible until the year 2016.

Tonight marks the very night when Mars stops coming closer and starts moving away from us in its roughly 26-month orbital cycle - at 6:47 p.m. ET, according to this handy list of the planet's oppositions and close approaches.

This year, Mars comes as close as 54.8 million miles - not as close as the historic pass-by of 2003 (34.6 million miles), but still a night-brightener. It shouldn't be hard to pick out the butterscotch-colored, steadily glowing jewel in the sky, but if you need help, just consult Space.com's sky chart.

The Hubble telescope has been capturing Mars up close for more than a decade, since before NASA's first Mars rover ever bounced down to the surface. Today, two rovers are surveying the planet from ground level, three orbiters are mapping the globe from above, and another lander is on the way. So is it really worth Hubble's precious time to be taking pictures from afar?

"It's often surprising to people that, despite the fact that we have this armada of orbiters, landers and rovers on Mars, we can still do useful and unique scientific observations of Mars from Earth," said Cornell astronomer Jim Bell, who is a member of the Hubble observation team as well as the lead scientist for the panoramic color cameras on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers.

Because of its far-seeing perspective, Hubble still provides the best all-at-once global views of the planet. Although the orbiters can produce much higher-resolution mosaics, they're just too close to see the whole planet at once.

"They're only seeing a bit at a time - strips of data taken at the same time of day," Bell told me today. "You don't get an overall perspective."

The Hubble views show how all the parts of a planet work together: dust storms and icy clouds, the permanent ice caps and the ebb and flow of seasonal frost. The latest pictures document thin, bluish clouds of water ice that are appearing just as springtime is coming to northern latitudes. That's a view that Hubble really hasn't seen up close before, Bell said.

"This data set really fills in what had been a missing gap in coverage during Mars' year," he said.

Scientists are particularly interested in how water moves around between Mars' surface ice and the atmosphere due to the planet's seasonal changes. "There's an enormous amount of water-ice cloudiness in the wintertime," Bell said. "How that super-cloudy season changes from the wintertime through the spring and the summer is still a subject of scientific debate."

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander, currently zooming toward a May landing in Mars' northern polar region, could help answer questions about the planet's water cycle - which naturally lead to the even bigger questions about past or present life.

Thanks to his double role, Bell gets to work with the big picture as part of the Hubble team, plus the up-close-and-personal views taken by the panoramic cameras, or Pancams, aboard the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The Pancams are the instruments that have been capturing the stunning color views cataloged on NASA's Web site for the rover missions, as well as in Bell's coffee-table book, "Postcards From Mars." For the latest Pancam views, you can also check out the imaging team's Web site at Cornell University.

The rovers' primary mission was slated to last just 90 days - but almost four years later, they're still going strong, and so are the cameras.

"We haven't detected any degradation," Bell said. "Nothing seems to be wearing out."

Even though the rovers have been surprisingly resilient, Bell and his colleagues on the rover science team are handling them with exceeding care. Right now their top priority is to check out a safe haven for Spirit.

Just as spring is coming to Mars' northern hemisphere, winter is coming to the southern hemisphere, where Spirit is located. The solar-powered rovers almost didn't make it through a huge dust storm earlier this year, so the team wants to make sure that Spirit is in a good sun-facing position for the coming winter.

"We've been focusing on taking pictures of the region where we will have to park the rover very soon," Bell said. "The rover could spend most of 2008 at this one location."

Meanwhile, Opportunity is carefully making its way down the slopes of Victoria Crater, taking lots of pictures as it goes. "We're being very methodical at each location," Bell said. "We've been using the photography to try to relate the specific areas where the rover is to the layers that we see elsewhere in the crater."

Will the rovers still be taking pictures when Mars has its next close approach to Earth, in early 2010? Four years ago, no one would have predicted that, but Bell has given up trying to guess how long the rovers and their cameras will last. "There's nothing that we can use as a predictor to say, 'Oh, man, the end is coming,'" he said.

To keep tabs on Mars exploration until the bitter end, check in with our special report, "Return to the Red Planet." And for great views of Mars as well as Hubble's glories, take a tour of our space gallery.

OTHER NEWS:

Customer backlash against bad service

Growing gap between promised and delivered experience

In the annals of customer service, 2007 will go down as the year fed-up consumers finally dropped the hammer. In August a 76-year-old retired nurse named Mona Shaw smashed up a keyboard and a telephone in a Manassas, Va., Comcast office after she says the cable operator failed to install her service properly. During her first visit to the branch outlet, the AARP secretary says she was left sitting on a bench in the hallway for two hours waiting for a manager. She returned, armed with a hammer, and let loose the rallying cry "Have I got your attention now?" Afterward, she was arrested, fined $345, and became a media sensation, capturing the hearts of frustrated consumers everywhere. (Says Comcast: "We apologize for any customer service issues that Ms. Shaw experienced.")

Three months earlier, in May, Michael Whitford uploaded a video in which he chooses among a golf club, an ax, and a sword before deciding on a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice for bashing his nonfunctioning Macbook to smithereens. In the video, Whitford, a systems engineer from Chandler, Ariz., says that Apple declined to cover the repair under warranty, citing damage from a spilled liquid. More than 340,000 people have viewed the black-and-white smash-up on YouTube. Whitford, whom BusinessWeek was not able to reach for comment, denies in the video that he spilled anything. In early July, he wrote on his blog that Apple had replaced his laptop. "I'm very happy now," he wrote. "Apple has regained my loyalty."

Meet today's consumer vigilantes. Even if they're not all wielding hammers, many are arming themselves with video cameras, computer keyboards, and mobile devices to launch their own personal forms of insurrection. Frustrated by the usual fix-it options — obediently waiting on hold with Bangalore, gamely chatting online with a scripted robot — more consumers are rebelling against company-prescribed service channels. After getting nowhere with the call center, they're sending "e-mail carpet bombs" to the C-suite, cc-ing the top layer of management with their complaints. When all else fails, a plucky few are going straight to the top after uncovering direct numbers to executive customer-service teams not easily found by mere mortals.

And of course, they're filling up the Web with blogs and videos, leaving behind venom-spewed tales of woe. "There's a certain degree of extremism that's popping up, [a sense of] I'm going to get results, whatever means necessary,'" says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of Nielsen Online Strategic Services, which measures consumer-generated media. "Companies can brush these off as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can say there's a very important insight in [their] emotions."

Behind the guerrilla tactics is a growing disconnect between the experience companies promise and customers' perceptions of what they actually get. Consumers already pushed to the brink by evaporating home equity, job insecurity, and rising prices are more apt to snap when hit with long hold times and impenetrable phone trees. Just ask those who responded to our second annual ranking of the best companies for customer service, which uses data from J.D. Power & Associates. The average service scores for the brands in our study dipped slightly this year, and about two-thirds of the names that were in both years' studies were lower. (Like BusinessWeek, J.D. Power is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

By: Jena McGregor
BUSINESSWEEK