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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."
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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"Now we're assuming they're cleaning, but all we can really say is that overnight the solar panels produced between 2 and 5 percent additional power immediately,'' he said. "We're surmising that for some reason dust is being removed from the solar panel and that's increasing the efficiency of the sunlight being converted to electricity."
Any hardcore space-geeks care to propose any other explanation?
Seriously, i'm just wondering what else might explain this, because enough moving atmosphere on Mars to clean the panels is very interesting to me. Other possibilities anyone?
Have you followed the animation link? There is something at the bottom that looks like a tiny tinfoil hat that appears and disappears and reappears ad nauseam! Just thinking about it I have whirlwinds in my head... I need to get some sleep.
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It's thought that these dust devils may be responsible for the mystery power boost to the rovers' solar cells.
:(
It was Martians who powered them up!! This dust devil theory is just yet another government trick in fooling you that there are no Martians!! Next they'll reiterate there's no giant face sculpture on Mars.
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?
Will the next batch of rovers be equipped with windsocks, to measure the direction of the wind?
And what do you call those spinning things to measure airspeed? The ones with four arms with little hemispheric "cups" that catch the wind. KnowwhatImeanVerne?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I don't think that terraforming Mars would help here.
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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!
For a long time, I've believed that for Humanity to survive, we *MUST* have colonies on more than just Earth. We have the technology to kill everything on this planet in minutes, and it takes a mistake by one person to start that chain of events. Maybe through our own greed and industrialization, we've already set the earth on a fatal spiral through pollution. There are also other events that can happen, which are on more of a sci-fi scale. What if the sun goes super nova? What if a giant asteroid crashes into the earth?
I'm all for spreading colonies, but your last two examples are a little more realistic than "sci-fi." We know that the sun's going to die; it'll take 4.5 billion years, but it will definitely happen. And a large asteroid will almost certainly strike the Earth. One killed the dinosaurs, and that was only 65 million years ago (a blink of an eye in the history of the Earth).
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It's easy TAS the devil is on holiday, got a ride with duck dodgers and presto, thats why they are called dust "devils"
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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.
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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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Frost on Mars had already been observed by Viking in 1979 (e.g., here).
Why anyone would go to the trouble of digging up my http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98777& cid=8427936year old post on dust devils and then insert Star Wars spoilers into it is completely beyond me. Bonus points for remembering my post, but several thousand negative points for the plagarism and spoilers.
It doesn't seem like a good thing to count on. In Spirit's case, it was over 400 days into the mission before it got this boost. They've been dealing with decreased energy availability for months. Plus, they estimated the odds were about equally as likely that some other critical part of the rover would fail before the solar panels became obscured. They will, however, probably reconsider their estimates for how long a solar powered rover can operate. The Sojourner lasted about 90 days, so they figured with the increased panel area, they could probably double that.
The next rover mission (Mars Surface Laboratory) will probably be nuclear powered so they can guarantee energy degradation won't be a problem unless it survives for quite a few years. This would also mean they aren't limited to locations near the equator, so if NASA decides there's something interesting near the poles, they can go there. Since the landing method will be different, the rover will be able to land in an area about 1/5 the size of the current rovers. This should give the mission planners a lot more options than they had with the twin Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on a big empty plain and on the floor of a giant, ancient crater respectively.
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/Marsa
The standard atmosphere surface pressure on earth is 1013.23 millibars (mb), or 29.92 inches of mercury.
A record High Pressure in Siberia made it up to 1083.8 mb/32.01 inches, and a Pacific Typhoon had a record low pressure of 879 mb/25.69 inches of mercury.
So, compared to Earth by altitude (approximately):
5,000 feet - 850 mb, 1 mile high 10,000 ft - 700 mb, 2 miles Oxygen required for unpressurized aircraft 18,000 ft - 500 mb (half the atmosphere is above/below this level), 3 miles 30,000 ft - 300 mb (70% of atmosphere is below), 6 miles high, entering the Stratosphere Dead Zone: Fatal without 100% oxygen source 53,000 ft - 100 mb (90% below, 10 miles, Stratosphere Fatal without Pressure suit: Blood pressure exceedes environment pressure, so oxygen is not absorbed Blood starts to outgas (boil) causing the Bends 68,000 ft - 50 mb (95%) 13 miles 102,000 ft - 10 mb (99%) 20 miles 104,000 ft - 9 mb High pressure on Mars 110,000 ft - 7 mb Average Mars pressure, 24 miles aloft on Earth 120,000 ft - 5 mb (99.5%) Higher terrain Mars pressure 157,000 ft - 1 mb (99.9%) Mars mountain tops, 30 miles on Earth Oh, yes - Earth has 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and all that. Water vapor can be up to 4% or so on hot, humid days.
In other words, Mars Tourists will need to pack much more than a towel and sunscreen.
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