NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is taking movies of dust devils — whirlwinds carrying dust — scooting across a plain on Mars.
“This is the best look we’ve ever gotten of the wind effects on the martian surface as they are happening,” said Dr. Mark Lemmon, a rover team member and atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station.
Spirit, operated from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been using its navigation camera to routinely check for dust devils. It began seeing dust devils last month in individual frames from the camera.
Lemmon said, “We’re hoping to learn about how dust is kicked up into the atmosphere and how the wind is interacting with the surface. It’s exciting that we now have a systematic way of capturing dust devils in movies rather than isolated still images.”
