NASA’s latest Mars rover caught an important alien sighting when an onboard camera happened to spot a red planet dust devil crossing Jezero crater.
Engineers on the Perseverance The mission saw the distant whirlwind of footage captured by one of the rover’s cameras as the dust clears its way behind the robber’s robotic arm. NASA has published images of the dust devil, but has not released any estimates of its size or speed.
“I’ve seen a dust devil. You can see it in the distance behind my robotic arm in this enhanced / edited view. The dust devil moves from right to left creating whirlwinds of dust in its path,” said Perseverance mission representatives. wrote in a tweet late Tuesday (March 16).
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA’s Perseverance rover
I’ve seen a dust devil. You can see it in the distance behind my robotic arm in this enhanced / edited view. The dust devil moves from right to left creating whirlwinds of dust in its path. pic.twitter.com/t18DxdcSTwMarch 16, 2021
As you can see in this enhanced Space.com video (including audio obtained earlier in the mission), the dust devil moves from right to left, starting from the right side of the animation. Perseverance did not land on Mars until February 18 and spent about 25 days on the Red Planet called “sols” on the surface.
Dust devils happen on both Earth and the Red Planet. These spinning columns of air are made visible by the dirt they kick off the ground. On Earth, dust devils usually form on clear days when the soil absorbs a lot of heat from the sun. Under the right conditions, heated air can spin close to the surface as it rises further up through small segments of cooler air.
Mars is coming aphelion, when it is furthest in its orbit from the sun, but it is clear that solar energy is still strong enough to create dust devils. And scientists have seen aphelion dust devils before: During the 2012 aphelion, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter saw a relatively colossal dust devil at a height of 800 meters and a diameter of 30 meters. Even that spacecraft’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera saw a swarm of dust devils in 2015.
In fact, spacecraft is as old as the Viking Missions of the 1970s have seen dust devils. But because the phenomena are fleeting, missions sometimes have to wait many years to discover one. The possibility of NASA only saw a dust devil in 2010, about seven years after his mission. His twin brother, Spirit, captured one incredible video of dust devils racing across the surface in a group in 2005, about two years after the mission of the duo Mars Exploration Rover.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.