NASA sent its Perseverance rover to Jezero crater on Mars to look for clues to past life. While there, the car-sized robot has witnessed hundreds of vigorous dust devils.
It turns out that Jezero Crater, a region that planetary scientists suspect was once full of water, is an extremely dynamic and dusty world. “Jezero crater may be one of the most active sources of dust on the planet,” Manuel de la Torre Juarez, a NASA scientist working on the Perseverance mission, said in a statement.
The space agency recently released images of this robust activity of the dust devil spinning in the crater, which was captured in July 2021. You can see a series of dust devils spinning simultaneously through the landscape, both in the foreground and on the hills. red from a distance.
Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI
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Every day, at least four of these vortices pass near the rover. They form when the ground heats up more than the air, heating the air above. Ascending currents increase as the cooler air then sinks downward, creating air of vertical circulation. Dust devils on Mars, however, can be much larger than those on Earth.
At times, the Perseverance rover also detects gusts of wind that lift dust clouds into the Martian sky. “The largest of these created a massive cloud covering 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers),” NASA said.
Sometimes large regional or planetary dust storms can cover the red planet. Understanding how vigorous dust activity occurs in Jezero Crater (perhaps the rough surface helps the wind lift the dust into the air) can help mission planners predict these intense weather events.
Sometimes dust storms can be so thick that they prevent sunlight from reaching the surface, turning from day to night. It is a serious problem for robotic exploration missions, or perhaps future human missions, which depend on sunlight for energy. The dust is so ruthless that it finally deprived the legendary NASA rover Opportunity of light and the robot ran out of energy. Engineers were unable to turn on the robot again.
But about 2 billion years ago, perhaps Mars was not the immensely dusty earth it is today. Water was flowing to the surface, and Perseverance is now looking for evidence of ancient life that might have lived in this once humid world.