Slashdot Mirror
New Movies of Whirlwinds on Mars
FleaPlus writes "The Pasadena Star-News, APOD, and WPBF report on new movies of Martian whirlwinds, captured by Spirit rover inside Gusev Crater. These movies are the result of a new imaging technique developed after the initial spotting of whirlwinds by Spirit last month.
Here is the first and second video. According to a rover team member, 'This is the best look we've ever gotten of the wind effects on the martian surface as they are happening.'"
Direct links to the animated GIFs are here:
;-)
PIA07861.gif and PIA07863.gif.
To those of you that don't want to download 3MB of animated GIFs for a 2 second view of a whirlwind on Mars let me sum it up for you. Dust, a small hill, and what appears to be a UFO dancing around on the screen.
For those of you that are conspiracy theorists... This could be a UFO sighting! It also could have been made in any one of the deserts in the USA (or abroad!)
There is atmosphere on mars, it's about 100times less then that of the earth at "sea level", but it is still significant. And there is H2O in Mar's Atmosphere, where do you think those melting ice caps go in the martian summer =)
h tm l
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Mars/atmosphere.
I'm not a meteorologist, but: I think that the sun heats the atmosphere differently, thus creating what is known as a katabatic (I think that's what it's called) wind. Also, the atmosphere does not move precisely in synch with the rotation of mars, so you get some turbulence
The page will almost certainly get /.d since the animated GIFs are over 1.5 MB each.
Here's a mirror if that happens:
Video 1
Video 2
Have fun!
Unless I'm mistaken, if you look closely along the top, right edge of the images in the first link you can see another dust devil. It appears near the horizon edge and meets the edge of the overall image right before the main dust devil appears.
Unless it's some kind of artifact from the processing it looks like NASA got a two-for-one.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No need for winds to start up a dust devil; they'll kick off on a perfectly calm day. What happens is that the sun heats the ground. The ground heats the air just above it. The Hot air is less dense than cold air above it, and so it tries to rise through the cold air. Some pushing and shoving goes on, because the cold air doesn't really want to move out of the way, meanwhile more air is getting heated by the ground. Eventually, the hot air finds a weak spot in the obstinate cold air and coalesces into a coherent stream which rushes upward. It sucks in hot air from the ground all around the stream; most times, due to terrain effects or random noise, the incoming air will start a rotation of the column of rising air, and Bingo! you've got a dust devil. /frank
And the worms ate into his brain.
The sun pushes them. when one side of the planet is hot, and the other is cold, the hot air tries to move into the cold air. hot air expands, and pushes itself into neighboring areas.
some locations on mars are different colors, so the sun gets converted to heat differently in different areas. eventually you get a lot of wind that seems to come from nowhere, because of turbulence. geography and other packets of high and low pressure cause turbulence.
so your answer to what pushes the wind on mars is the same thing that pushes the wind on the Earth. Sunlight.
Why is this marked so highly? The blueberries are clearly already round when embedded in their source rocks. They're formed the same way a number of types of rocks on Earth are: A hollow cavity is filled in by a different mineral than the surrounding rock (a water soluable mineral) which is harder than the surrounding rock; the surrounding rock erodes and leaves the filler mineral.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
This guy applies modern image processing to old tapes of raw data from Russian "Venera" missions. Quite fascinating views, but still, too hot and acidic... I guess a spacecraft gets "eaten" by the atmosphere there in like an hour...
Paul B.
"The sun pushes them. when one side of the planet is hot, and the other is cold, the hot air tries to move into the cold air. hot air expands, and pushes itself into neighboring areas."
I think it's more a matter of warmer "air" (generic atmospheric gases) wanting to rise, and colder air wanting to sink. You get a convection thing going.
For a good effect here on earth, cooler evening winds coming off of mountains and down canyons is a good example. Large thunderstorms as well - rising warm air slurps up a bunch of surrounding ground air with it (winds radially toward center of buildup) then when it all cools high in the atmosphere it cuts loose and the cold air rapidly sinks back toward the ground, creating strong winds radially away from the storm's center.
Actually, the "toxic" issue is often overstated. Spectral analysis of Venus clearly reveals the H2SO4, but it is a very tiny portion of Venus's atmosphere, and is essentially absent near the surface - we see it because it's in the cloud tops. Also, another mistaken concept is that venus is completely dry - it actually has something like 1/6th the partial pressure of water that we have on Earth (it's just a tiny amount in comparison to all of those other gasses)
The concept of terraforming Venus is a rather interesting proposition. For "any" life to survive you need to be able bring the temperature down on the surface (the cloudtops lack all of the minerals needed for life), but for humans to live there, you need to bring the pressure down dramatically (which would help with the temperature). Perhaps non-replicating buoyant robots/nanobots/chemicals produced on earth and seeded into the upper atmosphere of Venus could manage to use solar energy to precipitate out long carbon chains. I can't think of where to start on that engineering problem, though - it's huge.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.