NASA constantly publishes online photos and videos recorded from the surface of Mars by the Perseverance rover. , surprise with their shapes or textures,
A strange luminous vortex rushes across the Martian desert. Intriguing recording
This time, NASA published a recording online showing the panorama of Mars. There would be nothing strange about it if it weren’t for the fact that in the background, just above the surface of the Red Planet, a mysterious object passed by. It will appear on the hills in the distance and move rapidly towards lower areas over a few seconds.
However, in the published version, NASA explains that we are dealing with a normal and common phenomenon on Mars. The intriguing object is actually the so-called dust devil (literally translated as “dust devil”), which in Polish we would translate as a dust whirlpool. It is a cloud of dust lifted from the surface by the swirling air of the highly rarefied Martian atmosphere.
Dust whirls were first discovered on Mars in the 1970s thanks to the Viking probes, but they sometimes (much less frequently) also occur on Earth. They are created when rising cells of warm air mix with descending columns of cooler, and therefore heavier, air, scientists explain. However, Earth’s dust whirls are small and disappear quickly.
Martian whirlpools can grow to much larger sizes, but they are much smaller than Earth’s tornadoes, which do not occur on Mars. As scientists write, observations of this type of dust whirls on the surface of the Red Planet allow us to better understand the Martian atmosphere and the mechanisms that control the local weather.
As NASA explains, the recording was made on August 30 this year, i.e. the 899th sol (Martian day) of Perseverance’s stay on Mars. The vortex was approximately 60 meters in diameter and 118 meters high, although only part of it is visible in the photos. It formed about 4 km from the rover and moved above the surface at a speed of about 19 km/s. The recording consists of 21 frames taken four seconds apart and corrected in post-production, and was accelerated twenty times.
Source: Gazeta
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