NASA’s Mars Rover Captures a Giant Dust Devil Swallowing Its Friend

Mars is simply a devil devour devil world. The Perseverance rover precocious witnessed a gruesome country connected the Red Planet, successful which a particulate devil consumed its smaller counterpart, morphing into one, somewhat larger, swirling file of aerial and dust.

NASA’s six-wheeled robot was carrying retired an imaging experimentation to amended recognize the Martian ambiance erstwhile it captured the 2 particulate devils astatine play. Using its navigation camera, the Perseverance rover snapped images of respective particulate devils spinning erratically connected the occidental rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater, successful an country called Witch Hazel Hill.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/INTA-CSIC/Space Science Institute/ISAE-Supaero/University of Arizona

The images were stitched into a abbreviated video that reveals the larger particulate devil, which was astir 210 feet (65 meters) wide, and a smaller particulate devil, astir 16 feet (5 meters) wide, trailing behind. Two much particulate devils tin beryllium seen swirling successful the background.

The tiny, unassuming twister walked consecutive into its ain demise, and was swallowed up by its larger counterpart. “Convective vortices—aka particulate devils—can beryllium alternatively fiendish,” Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance idiosyncratic astatine the Space Science Institute successful Boulder, Colorado, said successful a statement. “These mini-twisters rotation the aboveground of Mars, picking up particulate arsenic they spell and lowering the visibility successful their contiguous area. If 2 particulate devils hap upon each other, they tin either obliterate 1 different oregon merge, with the stronger 1 consuming the weaker.”

Dust devils were archetypal spotted by NASA’s Viking ngo successful the 1970s, which photographed the cheeky improvement from Mars’ orbit. Two decades later, the Pathfinder ngo captured the archetypal representation of a particulate devil from the aboveground of Mars, with 1 adjacent passing implicit the lander. Since then, NASA’s Martian rovers person captured their just stock of particulate devils.

Unlike Earth, Mars’ ambiance is excessively bladed to enactment tornadoes. Instead, arsenic aerial adjacent the planet’s aboveground heats up and rises to conscionable the cooler, denser air, it begins to rotate. As much aerial joins the column, it picks up speed, arsenic good arsenic dust, and creates a swirling particulate devil.

“If you consciousness atrocious for the small devil successful our latest video, it whitethorn springiness you immoderate solace to cognize the larger perpetrator astir apt met its ain extremity a fewer minutes later,” Lemmon said. “Dust devils connected Mars lone past astir 10 minutes.”