NASA’s Perseverance rover has again recorded a weather phenomenon on Mars that is similar to what can be found in desert regions of the Earth.
The “dust devil” on the western edge of the Martian crater Jezero was captured. According to the team’s calculations, at that moment the tornado was about 4 km from the rover and was moving from east to west at a speed of about 19 km/h. It was also possible to determine that the width of the “dust devil” was approximately 60 meters and to make assumptions about its height, since the tornado was not completely captured.
“We can’t see the top of the Dust Devil, but the shadow it casts gives us a good idea of its height. So, the shadow of the dust devil indicates that it is about 2 km high,” says Mark Lemmon, a member of the Perseverance science team and a planetary scientist at the Boulder Institute for Space Sciences.
The rover managed to take 21 pictures of a tornado on the Red Planet using one of its navigation cameras. As a result, the team spliced the photos together to make a video and sped it up 20 times.
It should be noted that the Perseverance rover landed at the bottom of the Jezero crater in February 2021 on a mission to find evidence that life once existed on Mars. The spacecraft also collects soil samples for subsequent return to Earth.
Researchers are confident that the Jezero crater is an ideal place to search for signs of past life on Mars, as billions of years ago, a large lake and a river delta were located in this crater.
During its research, the Perseverance rover has already observed dozens of dust devils. Back in September 2021, the rover even managed to record the sound of one of these vortices, which happened for the first time during Mars exploration.
Observations of such natural phenomena help scientists to better understand the atmosphere of Mars in order to create more realistic weather models on the Red Planet.
