NASA's Perseverance rover captures 'fiendish' dueling dust devils on Mars: See video
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Martian dust devil caught by NASA rover
A Martian dust devil was captured rolling across the planet's surface by NASA's Perseverance Mars rover.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/INTA-CSIC/Space Science Institute/ISAE-Supaero/University of Arizona
A six-wheeled robot wandering the rugged terrain of Mars recently came across two small tornadoes whipping around the planet's surface.
In a short video released Thursday by NASA, the two dust devils can be seen swirling and spinning on the rim of a feature known as the Jezero Crater. The landmark is famous as being the landing site of Perseverance, a Martian rover NASA sent to explore the planet about four years ago.
Perseverance, about the size of a car, captured the whirling twisters in January about a month after completing an arduous trek from the bottom of the crater up to its rim.
Dust devils are common occurrences on the Martian surface that NASA has regularly observed since the 1970s with rovers on the ground and orbiters from above. But what makes Perseverance's most recent sighting of the phenomenon stand out is that in the footage, one larger dust devil appears to eat the other.
Mars rover captures small tornadoes
Video of the larger dust devil consuming a smaller one was compiled from a series of images Perseverance captured with one of its exterior navigation cameras on its mast, which helps engineers back on Earth steer the rover remotely.
When the rover snapped the images Jan. 25 from little more than a half-mile away, the larger twister was about 210 feet wide, while the smaller one trailing it was roughly 16 feet wide. Two other dust devils can also be seen in the background at left and center.
At the time, Perseverance's science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was using the rover to study and understand the forces at play in Mars' atmosphere.
Exploring Mars: Perseverance, Curiosity rovers make separate finds pointing to past life on Red Planet
What causes Martian dust devils to form?
Dust devils, more officially known as convective vortices, are common features on the surface of Mars that have been regularly observed for decades.
These swirling features are formed by rising and rotating columns of warm air that picks up dust as they begin to spin.
The "fiendish" mini-twisters "wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering the visibility in their immediate area," Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, being caught in such a dust devil would feel like being hit by a gust of wind – albeit a dirty one.
If two dust devils happen upon each other, as happened in January, they will either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker.
Perseverance, which has imaged dusty whirlwinds many times since 2021, famously used its SuperCam microphone to record the first sounds of a Martian dust devil.
But just because dust devils are common doesn't make them easy to capture. Scientists can't predict when they'll appear, and when they do, they only last about 10 minutes, so Perseverance routinely monitors in all directions for them.
What to know about Perseverance
In July 2020, the Perseverance rover underwent a 200-day, 300-million-mile journey to reach Mars. After landing in February 2021 in the Jezero Crater, the robot, controlled remotely from Earth, spent nearly four years searching for and collecting more than two dozen rock samples – many of which are stored at the first-ever depot on another planet for future retrieval.
The bottom of the Jezero Crater – believed to have formed 3.9 billion years ago from a massive impact – is considered to be among the most promising areas on Mars to search for evidence of ancient life. Perseverance's adventures have revealed some insights about the enigmatic Martian geology.
Now, after years in the trenches of Jezero, Perseverance in December finally summitted the steep Martian crater to begin the next leg of its journey exploring the crater's rim.
NASA and the European Space Agency hope to one day soon retrieve these samples and bring them back to Earth before humans themselves venture to the Red Planet.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com
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