Mars is a devilish world. Perseverance Rover recently witnessed a terrifying scene on the Red Planet where the dust devil consumes a smaller counterpart and turns into a slightly larger, slightly larger, rotating air and dust.
NASA's six-wheeled robot is conducting imaging experiments to better understand the Martian atmosphere when it captures two types of dust. Using the navigation camera, Perseverance rover rotates several images of dust on the western edge of the Jezero crater on Mars in an area called Witch Hazel Hill.
The images are stitched in a short video that reveals larger dust, about 210 feet (65 meters) wide and smaller dust devils, about 16 feet (5 meters) wide, lagging behind 16 feet (5 meters). Two other dust devils can be seen spinning in the background.
The tiny, modest whirlwind walked straight into its own demise and was swallowed by a larger opponent. “The convective vortex-Aka dust devils can become very demonic,” Mark Lemmon, a perseverance scientist at the Boulder Space Science Institute in Colorado, said in a statement. “These mini-two linger on the surface of Mars, picking up dust and reducing current visibility. If two dusts occur to each other, they can extinction or merge with each other, and the more powerful people consume the weak.”
The Dust Devil was first discovered by NASA on a Viking mission in the 1970s, which photographed the cheeky phenomenon in Mars orbit. Twenty years later, the Pathfinder mission captured the first image of the Dust Devil from the surface of Mars, and even crossed the lander. Since then, NASA's Mars rovers have captured quite a few of their dust devils.
Unlike Earth, the atmosphere on Mars is too thin to support the tornado. Instead, as the air near the Earth's surface heats up and rises to satisfy the cooler, the dense air begins to rotate. As more and more air is added to the pillars, it can pick up speed and dust and create vortex dust devils.
“If you feel bad about the little devil in our latest video, it's likely that in a few minutes it's possible to know that the larger perpetrator is most likely to reach his or her ending,” Lemmon said. “The dust on Mars only lasts about 10 minutes.”
