Whirlwinds on Mars, From the Ground

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."

Comments

Just thought of one.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Vibration from movement: is there enough jostle to shake dust off the panels from mere rover movement about the surface or is that too small to matter here?

Spirit power boost

[FrostedWheat]

The link talks about Opportunity's power boost, but a few days ago Spirit also had the same thing happen to it.
Quite amazing stuff, if this keeps up the rovers should last a very long time!

Re:Animation

[tverbeek]

Calling it an "animation" is stretching it pretty far. The second frame isn't even on-register with the first one, so it's really just a pair of "with" and "without" snapshots.

Re:Animation

[Surazal]

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

If it doesn't find another tornado, then that also will increase the accuracy of the prediction slightly. ;)

Re:pre-emptive strike against all the teraformers.

[tverbeek]

To make the atomsphere more earth like, we'd probably send some plants over, such as algae, and maybe grasses. As it grows, it may cover artifacts that could be interesting.

We can't get grasses to grow in Tuscon, let alone Valles Marineris. Even terran algae would have a tough time of it, with so little CO2 and sunlight. So I don't think there's much danger of them obscuring the geography, and even less chance of them covering up any artifacts... since it's already pretty clear that there was never any civilisation capable of creating any artifacts.

Mars is just a huge rock, with some water and vapors clinging to it. An astonishingly fascinating rock, but still just a rock. If we ever undertake terraforming it, that will be so far enough in the future that I think we'll have a pretty good opportunity between now and then to give that big rock a good studying... long enough to make an informed judgment of whether to proceed with Project Genesis or not. Worrying about the introduction of interplanetary kudzu at this point is a bit premature.