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Whirlwinds on Mars, From the Ground

Posted by timothy on from the close-up dept.

Neil Halelamien writes "Back in 1999, satellite images were photographed of 5-mile-high whirlwinds streaking across the surface of Mars. A couple of months ago the Spirit rover got a close up view of whirlwind tracks, and this past week photographed a whirlwind in action (animation). It's thought that these dust devils may be responsible for the mystery power boost to the rovers' solar cells. Last year the rovers also spotted clouds and frost."

4 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:pre-emptive strike against all the teraformers. by caluml · · Score: 4, Funny
    What if the sun goes super nova?

    I don't think that terraforming Mars would help here.

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  2. Re:Animation by CrackedButter · · Score: 4, Funny

    Looks more like a ghost to be honest. The ghost of Beagle WOOOOOOOO....

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  3. Re:Windsock by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Funny
    Will the next batch of rovers be equipped with windsocks,

    I'm just hoping they'll be equipped with a Winsock, so they can run nifty TCP/IP apps like Mosaic and WS-FTP, and maybe even a web server like ZBServer!

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  4. Re:pre-emptive strike against all the teraformers. by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Funny
    "What if the sun goes super nova?"

    I don't think that terraforming Mars would help here.

    Right. We'd be so preoccupied rewriting all the books about stellar physics to explain how it's possible for our star to go supernova, that we wouldn't have time to move everyone from the "atomize" zone (Earth's orbit) to the "atomize a few minutes later" zone (Mars' orbit).

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