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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!)
Clearly this effect is caused by the recoil of an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator
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)
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.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
These movies are certainly better that Red Planet.
What if that mime really is trapped in a box?
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.
...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.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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 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.
sigs, as if you care.
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.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.