NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured a rare and dramatic moment of dust devils colliding on Mars, providing scientists with valuable insights into the Red Planet’s atmosphere. The footage, taken by the rover’s navigation camera, shows a larger dust devil overtaking a smaller one in the Jezero Crater.
Dust devils are short-lived tornado-like phenomena that play a significant role in Martian weather patterns and atmospheric behavior. Scientists have been studying them to better understand the dynamic surface conditions of Mars.
According to Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute, “Convective vortices — aka dust devils — can be rather fiendish.” These mini-twisters wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering visibility in their immediate area. If two dust devils happen upon each other, they can either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker.
Dust devils are formed by rising and rotating columns of warm air. Air near the planet’s surface becomes heated by contact with the warmer ground and rises through the denser, cooler air above. As other air moves in from a certain direction, scientists use that information to focus their monitoring to try to catch additional whirlwinds.
The Perseverance rover is NASA’s most advanced Mars rover, launched as part of the Mars 2020 mission under the agency’s broader Moon to Mars exploration strategy. A key goal of the rover is astrobiology — searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. To support this, Perseverance is the first mission to collect and cache samples of Martian rock and regolith, which could one day be returned to Earth through NASA and ESA’s Mars Sample Return Program for detailed scientific analysis.
Beyond the search for past life, the rover is studying Mars’ geology and climate history, gathering critical data to prepare for future human missions.
Source: https://scitechdaily.com/nasas-perseverance-rover-captures-rare-martian-dust-devil-collision-in-stunning-detail