NASA’s Perseverance Rover Films Dust Devil on Mars
Mars is an interesting planet with a wild landscape we’re still trying to suss out with our rovers. But recently NASA’s Perseverance noticed something truly extraordinary on the red planet: a wild dust devil.
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00:00 Mars is an interesting planet with a wild landscape we're still trying to
00:07 suss out with our rovers. But recently NASA's Perseverance noticed something
00:11 truly extraordinary on the red planet. A wild dust devil. This was the small
00:15 cyclone the rover's cameras filmed, now released by NASA. According to Mars
00:19 researchers, the small twister reached around one and a quarter miles into the
00:23 sky and was around 200 feet wide. It was filmed traveling at speeds of around 12
00:27 miles per hour in an area called the Thoroughfare Ridge in the Jezero crater.
00:31 Experts say capturing phenomena like this on camera is helping them to better
00:35 understand weather patterns and topography on Mars. With NASA JPL Cal
00:39 Tech explaining about this one in particular, "much weaker and generally
00:44 smaller than Earth's tornadoes, dust devils are one of the mechanisms that
00:47 move and redistribute dust around Mars." But this was just a dust devil, not even
00:51 classified as a full-fledged tornado. Though NASA does say that tornadoes on
00:55 Mars are actually a lot stronger than the ones here on Earth, adding that at
00:58 the moment experts are currently unable to predict Martian tornadoes.
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