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

Animated GIFs, not movies...

[garcia]

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!) ;-)

Re:Animated GIFs, not movies...

[PIPBoy3000]

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).

Re:Animated GIFs, not movies...

[lucabrasi999]

This could be a UFO sighting!

Actually it looks more like a piece of Beagle

Another NASA Cover-Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly this effect is caused by the recoil of an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator

Winds..

[grazzy]

Could anyone care to explain how winds are started if there is no to little atmosphere? Does this for instance imply that there is water in the air on mars?

Re:Winds..

[TheKidWho]

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

Re:Winds..

[Ironsides]

No idea, I just wanna know how those winds are starting. Doesnt something have to "push" them?

Winds on mars occur for the same reason as wind on earth. Pretty much the sun heats up one area more than another and causes a pressure differential. Just because there is a lot less atmosphere on mars doesn't mean it occurs for a different reason.

Re:Winds..

[FrankSchwab]

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

Re:Winds..

[Rei]

You mean, in the same way that Boreas, God of the North Wind, causes winter gales hear on Earth - by "pushing"? :)

Re:Winds..

[Naikrovek]

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.

Re:Winds..

[MooseByte]

"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.

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)

Planetay weather

[thewiz]

Interesting to see what the weather looks like on Mars. What I'd like to know is if weather.com is going to start posting forecasts for other planetary bodies anytime soon.

Very nice to know that the dust devils are helping the rovers along. I wonder if we could get them to wash and wax the rovers as well.

Blueberries

[The Fun Guy]

This supports a wind erosion theory for the bluberries. I'd heard people say that the atmosphere is too thin to really erode them much; clearly, if it's strong enough to suspend dust in densitites like this, it's got enough force to erode/polish the pebbles to roundness.

Re:Blueberries

[Rei]

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.

A Mars movie?

[OneBigWord]

These movies are certainly better that Red Planet.

Scientific proof

[TiggertheMad]

...and in conclusion, this footage offers concrete proof that there are not martian dust devils, as my esteemed colleges suggest, but proof of Tasmain Martianius Spinnus maximus, or in laymas terms, Martian Tasmanian Devils.

Mirror of GIFs

[alienfluid]

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!

The pictures are like Lost In Space

[John Seminal]

I had no idea there was wind on mars. That is kinda cool to think they have wind. If we built a enclosed research station, we could have wind generated power.

I hope we get a research station on mars, even if it is unmanned. It will be a starting point for building more.

Gosh, what next?

[RealProgrammer]

The properties of fluids are the same on Earth and Mars.

Man, what if all of physics works the same there? Just think of the number of stories.

"Scientist discovers light on Mars!"

"Stuff falls down when you drop it on Mars!"

"On Mars, stuff stays where you put it!"

"On Mars, a rock keeps moving if you kick it!"

"Mars displays friction!"

"On Mars, energy tends to move from stuff with more to stuff with less!"

This didn't start out as a Troll, sorry. I'm just tired of Martian News of the obvious.

Re:Gosh, what next?

[icejai]

This might tickle your brain a bit.

On earth, the day is blue and the sun sets red.

On mars, it's the other way around: The day is red and the sunsets are blue.

Weird huh?

What kind of analysis will scientists do with this

[joshtimmons]

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?

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.

Looks like

[Tenebrious1]

Looks like dust kicked up by aerial machine gun fire. Maybe the martians are using the rover as a training target.

I think Russians were there first... ;-)

[PaulBu]

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.