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New Movies of Whirlwinds on Mars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the this-don't-look-like-kansas-no-more dept.

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.'"

5 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Animated GIFs, not movies... by garcia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!) ;-)

    1. Re:Animated GIFs, not movies... by PIPBoy3000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I saw this on Fark a few days ago. The quality is good, if a bit choppy.

      FYI - this is further evidence of the process by which the rover's solar panels are regularly cleaned (thus extending the mission's life).

  2. Re:Winds.. by TheKidWho · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 =)

    http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Mars/atmosphere.h tm l

  3. Mirror of GIFs by alienfluid · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  4. Re:Winds.. by Naikrovek · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.