Left NavCam animation (heavily processed to reveal the activity)
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/j. Roger
Full size animation and source LINK
Woah. Mars has weather.
They even have sound of a dust devil passing over the rover…
Image, animation and audio clip: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25657
Wind and more in this clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU
I don’t know about you, Paul, but I find it amusing to think that we have more missions studying the weather and atmosphere than we do the surface, and that was true even when Zhurong and InSight were still going strong. Obviously it’s easier to orbit than to land, but between the USA, Europe and Asia I count six active missions, and I’m not even including the Chinese orbiter, which doesn’t do weather studies per se AFAIK.
I don’t envy the public outreach folks at NASA or ESA, when I find invariably find people IRL doing double takes and stopping me with “Wait, Mars has an atmosphere??” LOL I guess the video of Curiosity and Percy parachuting down to the surface doesn’t cut through, although people will then tell me about how dangerous the wind is going to be for the Mark Watneys of the future 😁
I’ve also met a large number of folk who have no idea of the science activities on or orbiting Mars. I used to believe that much of that was associated with the dumbing down of science in recent times. But now I believe that it’s more likely it’s a result of folk not reading newspapers any more. Most folk get their “news” from social media on their phone :(
Yep. We used to get satellite weather summaries fairly regularly, but Malin Space Science stopped publishing them a while back for some reason. Still, I find it pretty interesting to look at some of these old reports, if only to spin Mars around and see how pretty the planet would look from high orbit, with all those nearly-bluish cloud systems and muddy-looking dust raising events. The link shows what the planet looked like at this time (early spring) three Martian years ago:
Looking towards the equatorial latitudes, the aphelion cloud belt proceeded to take hold with water ice clouds in abundance from Tharsis to Elysium. Skies remained storm-free for Curiosity in Gale Crater and InSight on Elysium Planitia each afternoon.
Freaky to think that the Martian tropics have a cloudy season like our tropics do, even if the cause is completely different…
How tf is Martian Dust Devil not a superhero yet??
Only a matter of time :)