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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."

3 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Animation by FTL · · Score: 5, Informative
    Incase you are wondering about the /.ed animation, it is a two-frame, black and white, 1MB gif. The first frame shows a small whirlwind in the distance, the second frame doesn't show the whirlwind.

    Not impressive compared to the tornado footage we're used to from the local TV station. But one must remember that the rovers' actions are scripted in advance. So it was a complete coincidence that a whirlwind happened to be in-frame when they took a photo. Which says something about how common they must be if we just happened to snag a picture of one.

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    1. Re:Animation by Zone-MR · · Score: 4, Informative

      it won't tell us anything about how common they are until they snag a picture of another one

      Yeah it does. We can assume that a tornado is visible 1/Nth of the time, where N is the total number of pictures taken by the rover, and the 1 represents the picture with the tornado visible.

      If the rover snags a picture of another tornado it will increase the accuracy of our prediction slightly.

  2. Here ya go by zogger · · Score: 4, Informative
    composition

    95.3% carbon dioxide (CO2),

    2.7% nitrogen (N2),

    1.6% argon (Ar),

    0.15% oxygen (O2),

    0.03% water vapor (H2O)



    pressure

    1-9 millibars, depending on altitude; average 7 mb



    A little shy on the O2 department without a lot of terraforming action, pressure pretty low too, in short, no walking around without a spacesuit of some kind. It would seem possible though, given a large enough power source, you could run oxygen accumulators for inside use in your structures, etc..


    taken from http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/M/Marsat mos.html