At the end of August, the Perseverance rover filmed a large so-called dust devil (a swirling column of dust resembling a tornado) on Mars. According to NASA calculations, it probably moved at a speed of about 20 km/h and was about 2 km high.
Although the footage below was taken from a greater distance, however, as one of the members of the Perseverance team stated, the height of the vortex can be fairly accurately estimated even in similar cases.
“We cannot see the top of the dust devil, but the shadow it casts gives us a good indication of its height.” he clarified Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Boulder, Colorado’s Space Science Institute.
“They are mostly vertical columns. If this dust devil was also configured in this way, its shadow would indicate that it is about 1.2 miles high,” he added.
Dust devils are also found here on Earth, but they are much smaller: on average they measure 150 – 300 meters. And there aren’t that many of them.
On the red planet, according to available information, every day millions of such “devils” spin. In fact, it is one of the main ways dust enters the atmosphere there.
Cover photo is illustrative only,
2023-10-05 17:47:12
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