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.'"

Comments

Can't Wait

[TheKidWho]

Until they get the next Mars Rover there that's going to be powered by a RTG (http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_2009_Rover.htm)!!

If it ends up working anywhere near as well as the current rovers, it might still be operational when astronauts land on Mars in 2020(Im trying as hard as possible to be involved in this project once I get out of college)

Re:What kind of analysis will scientists do with t

[John Seminal]

I'm curious to know how much effort/man hours is put into studying this kind of phenomena. Do NASA folks just say "That's cool, look at that." like I do, or do they assign a team to spend a month trying to extrapolate airspeed, volume, spin direction, lifespan, and other attributes that I can't even think of?

I guess I mean: does this really mean anything important to a scientist, or is it just eyecandy for the taxpayers?

They have teams. Nothing is done because of individual interest. It is a huge beuracracy, you have managment like any business, that directs the scientists.

It is one of the knocks on the university system. When you start out, getting your BA or AB, you can study many different things, math, biology, literature, physics, sociology, chemisty. But once you start for a PhD, you then pick one small thing and spend the next 7 years studying it and researching it. For example, you could not pick Biology for a PhD, you would pick Genetics. And even then, you're research might be limited to a subset of Genetics, maybe how Gene X produces protien Y in albinos.

I think it would be cool if places like NASA let scientists pick thier projects. Or even let outsiders in, for example if you have a masters in geography and you're interested in helping map the surface of mars, that you can sign up for that work.

Come to think of it, why don't they run NASA like sourcefourge. There is alot of talent out there. And it would make people feel like they are contributing to discovery, rather than living a mundane dilbertesq life.