NASA on 3/4 released a short video created by photos taken from the Perseverance Robot’s navigation camera, showing that Mars swallowed a smaller whirlwind.
These towering and sometimes towering dust columns appear on the red planet. When Perseverance took a photo from about 1 km, a larger dust whirlwind had a diameter of about 65 m, while the smaller whirlwind followed with a diameter of about 5 m. There are also two other dust whirlwinds on the left and near the center. Perseverance recorded this scene while exploring the west of the Jezero low -lying hole, at a location called Witch Hazel hill.
“Convection – or dust whirlwinds – can be quite evil. These whirlwinds wander on the surface of Mars, swept with dust on the way and reduce the vision of the surrounding area. If the two dust whirlwinds meet each other, they can destroy each other or consolidate, the stronger whirlwind swallow weaker whirlwinds,” Mark Lemmon, the scientist at the Institute of Space Science in Boulder, Colorado.
The dust tornado formed from the warm air column is rising and rotating. The air near the planet’s surface is heated due to the warmer ground contact and rising through the cooler, more dense air. When another air block moves along the surface so that the warm air is rising, it begins to rotate. The new air mass rises into the column, accelerating like the skating athlete is rotating and collecting hands close to the body. The atmosphere rising also wrapped in dust, causing the dust to appear.
“The dust tornado plays a prominent role in the weather models on Mars. The study of dust is important because this phenomenon indicates the atmospheric conditions, such as the main speed and wind direction, and is responsible for about half of the dust in the Mars atmosphere,” said Katie Stack Morgan, NASA’s JPL thrust laboratory in Southern California, said.
Recording of dust needs a little luck. Scientists cannot predict when the dust will appear, so Perseverance regularly monitors all directions to find them. When they see them appear more at a specific time of the day or from a certain direction, they will focus on monitoring to record more tornadoes.
“If you regret for the small tornado in our latest video, you may feel comforted knowing that the big culprit is likely to spend a few minutes later. The dust on Mars only exists for about 10 minutes,” Lemmon said.