NASA’s Perseverance rover has given us an amazing have a look at a weather phenomenon that is very familiar to folks who live in desert regions here on Earth.
The car-sized Perseverance captured video of a dust devil swirling on the western rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater on Aug. 30, 2023.
Mission team members calculated that the little twister was about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) from Perseverance on the time and moving east to west at about 12 mph (19 kph). They determined it to be roughly 200 feet (60 meters) wide and got an estimated height on the article, too, although its upper reaches are out of frame.
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“We don’t see the highest of the dust devil, however the shadow it throws gives us indication of its height,” Perseverance science team member Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist on the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in an announcement.
“Most are vertical columns,” Lemmon added. “If this dust devil were configured that way, its shadow would indicate it’s about 1.2 miles (2 km) in height.”
Perseverance captured 21 images of the dust devil using one in all its navigation cameras. The mission team stitched those photos together to make the brand new video, which was sped up by an element of 20.
Perseverance landed on the ground of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero in February 2021, on a mission to go looking for signs of past Mars life and collect and cache dozens of samples for future return to Earth.
Jezero is an amazing place to do such work, mission team members say, for the crater hosted an enormous lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
Perseverance has detected dozens of dust devils during its time on the Red Planet. In September 2021, for instance, the rover captured audio of one in all these whirlwinds — a primary within the history of Mars exploration.
Perseverance’s dust devil observations are helping scientists higher understand Mars’ atmosphere and improve their Red Planet weather models, NASA officials said in the identical statement.