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Mars Rover Spots Clouds Shaped By Gravity Waves (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: NASA's Curiosity rover has shot more than 500 movies of the clouds above Mars, including the first ground-based view of martian clouds shaped by gravity waves, researchers reported this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The shots are the best record made so far of a mysterious recurring belt of equatorial clouds known to influence the martian climate. Understanding these clouds will help inform estimates of ground ice depth and perhaps recurring slope lineae, potential flows of salty water on the surface, says John Moores, a planetary scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, who led the study with his graduate student, Jake Kloos. "If we wish to understand the water story of Mars's past," Moores says, "we first need to [separate out] contributions from the present-day water cycle." Using Curiosity's navigation camera, Moores and Kloos recorded eight-frame movies of this wispy cloud belt for two martian years. They've used two angles to capture the clouds: one pointed directly up, to see wind direction and speed, and another that keeps the rover's horizon in the frame, allowing a view into the clouds' depth. Given the limited water vapor, solar energy, and atmosphere, the martian clouds lack the variety of shapes seen on Earth. But during one day of cloud gazing -- Curiosity's 1302th martian day, to be precise -- the team got lucky and saw something unusual. That day, when Curiosity looked to the horizon, it saw a sequence of straight, parallel rows of clouds flowing in the same direction: the first ground-based view of a gravity wave cloud. Similar to the waves that follow a pebble tossed into a pond, gravity waves are created when some unknown feature of the martian landscape causes a ripple in the atmosphere that is then seen in clouds. Such waves are common at the edge of the martian ice caps, but thought to be less frequent over its equator.
And the reason why we do not have those gravity waves here on Earth is?
Just a reminder: the gravity waves (waves resulting from gravity restoring an equilibrium) discussed in the article are different from gravitational waves (wave functions describing gravity itself).
I agree that astrophysicists tend to spout a lot of bullshit, but please see some of the above comments about the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves.
Who is making these clouds these days?
"It’s far from certain those are gravity waves, though, Heavens says. They could also be “cloud streets,” a similar looking pattern that’s potentially associated with strong winds striking heated air parcels as they near the top of the lower atmosphere."
Occams razor says it's strong winds.
They're seeing gravity waves everywhere now, even where they're not.
Just crawl back into your swamp where you came from.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!
Damn, that's embarrassing!
FTFA: "It’s far from certain those are gravity waves, though."
\m/
Gravitational waves on the other hand are extremely hard to observe, and they do not involve moving large massive bodies locally.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Curiosity's 1302th martian day, to be precise" is the best example of precision versus accuracy I've ever read on Slashdot.
It is caused by gravity, and the source of the gravity is Mars. "Gravity Waves" are what we old-schoolers used to call "Waves". Air goes over a mountain or ridge, and oscillates up and down for a while.
The "unseen anomaly" is a hill or valley. Not that anomalous, really.
It's a bit like dropping a glass and calling it a "gravity fall".
The autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!
More likely the Martian head-chef was brewing some Venusian sulfur-stew when a Romulian-fly pricked his ladle-hand. Oops go the striations ... but unknown? Dick + Jane = grant
Mars is a yuuuge commie plot funded by the UK secret police and Hollywood gangsters, who film all the fake rovers in Lena Dunham's basement.
Table-ized A.I.
How are we going to reach out to muslim nations?
What's the next research to get super-excited about only to find out it's "Not what you thought it was." ?
Why is it so unlikely?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
1302th
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