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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.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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).
lasindi
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
Overnight? While parked and sleeping?
A Science Vessel?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
It's easy TAS the devil is on holiday, got a ride with duck dodgers and presto, thats why they are called dust "devils"
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).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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