This February the Curiosity Rover captured footage of whirlwinds whipping up dust devils on the surface of Mars.
These dust devils, seen around the Gale Crater, are a result of the Martian summer, which is one of the windiest times of the year in this region.
Mackenzie Day is a geology graduate student and former member of the Mars Science Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the images were analyzed. She said that despite the differences between Earth’s and Mars’ atmospheres, the mechanism causing dust devils to form is the same.
“The (air) pressure is very different (on Mars),” Day said. “Here on Earth, the atmospheric pressure at the surface is one bar, and on Mars it’s 0.7 percent of a bar, so there’s a lot less air to move things around. But you still have these convective processes and heat from the sun warming the surface and transferring air to make wind and dust devils.”
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring the Gale Crater since August of 2012. The crater is 96 miles in diameter and has a three mile tall layered mountain called Aeolis Mons at it’s center.
“Gale Crater is one of about 50 craters like that on Mars, and on a lot of them we’d expect to have similar wind conditions,” Day said.
According to geosciences professor Gary Kocurek, winds on Mars shape the landscape, creating dust devils and sand dune formations in the Gale Crater and eroding away at Aeolis Mons.
“In the absence of liquid water on Mars, wind and ice processes have been the primary surface processes on Mars for the last few billions of years,” Kocurek said. “Unlike on Earth, where it is hard to find surfaces where the landscape does not show a dominant impact by water, on Mars nearly all landscapes show a wind impact and many have been largely created by the wind.”
Day said that studying the weather on Mars is important in planning space missions to the planet.
“Wind is certainly an important thing to consider, along with terrain,” Day said. “Given that (we’re) going there to explore the geology, knowing as much as possible before we get there will be very helpful”
