Rover captures one-mile-high whirlwind on Mars

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “Much weaker and generally smaller than Earth’s tornadoes, dust devils are one of the mechanisms that move and redistribute dust around Mars,” explained NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a robotic space exploration research and development centre in California. “Scientists study them to better understand the Martian atmosphere and improve their weather models.” Using data from the imagery, mission researchers determined that this particular dust devil was about four kilometres away. “We don’t see the top of the dust devil, but the shadow it throws gives us a good indication of its height,” said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and a member of the Perseverance science team. If this dust devil were configured that way, its shadow would indicate it is about 1.2 miles in height.” The Martain dust devil was seen moving east to west at about 12 mph along Thorofare Ridge Dust devils, which also occur on Earth, form when rising cells of warm air mix with descending columns of cooler air.