• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

NASA’s Perseverance Watches As Dust Devil On Mars Gets Eaten By A 65-Meter-Wide Dust Devil

April 10, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured unexpected footage of one dust devil consuming another during an imaging experiment.

While exploring the Witch Hazel Hill area of the Jezero Crater, the Perseverance science team took an opportunity to conduct an imaging experiment aimed at getting a better understanding of the Martian atmosphere. When it did, its cameras captured a number of dust devils swirling away in the distance. In the foreground, it captured a dust devil around 65 meters (210 feet wide) colliding with a 5-meter (16-foot) wide devil trailing just behind it.

“Convective vortices – aka dust devils – can be rather fiendish,” Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, explained in a statement. “These mini-twisters wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering the 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, sometimes called “willy willies” in Australia for reasons best known to them, form when air near a planet’s surface gets warmed by it and begins to rise through buoyant forces. Air moving along the surface to take the place of the rising air begins to rotate, and picks up speed as it enters the column, like how you can pick up speed on a roundabout by moving your body and limbs closer to the center. When the air kicks up dust – something Mars has plenty of – it becomes a dust devil, or willy willy.

“Dust devils play a significant role in Martian weather patterns,” Katie Stack Morgan, project scientist for the Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, added. “Dust devil study is important because these phenomena indicate atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing wind directions and speed, and are responsible for about half the dust in the Martian atmosphere.”

Other dust devils have been captured on the planet before, including their sound, but this appears to be the first time one has been spotted consuming another.

“If you feel bad for the little devil in our latest video, it may give you some solace to know the larger perpetrator most likely met its own end a few minutes later,” Lemmon added. “Dust devils on Mars only last about 10 minutes.”

By studying dust devils on Mars, scientists hope to learn about wind patterns and surface-atmosphere interactions on the planet, as well as how this dust-lifting affects the planet’s climate over time. While they may look large and impressive, given Mars’s thin atmosphere, they would feel like a particularly dusty gust of wind. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Mexico urges U.S. to invest in region to stem migration
  2. Struggling Laschet attacks rival on economy as German vote looms
  3. Twitter’s Top Bosses Have Been Purged After Musk’s Takeover
  4. The Last Of Us: Why Making Fungal Vaccines Is So Challenging

Source Link: NASA's Perseverance Watches As Dust Devil On Mars Gets Eaten By A 65-Meter-Wide Dust Devil

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Have You Seen This Snake? Florida Wants Your Help Finding Rare Species Seen Once In 50 Years
  • Plague Confirmed In Lake Tahoe Area For First Time In 5 Years, California Officials Say
  • Supergiant Star Spotted Blowing Milky Way’s Largest Bubble Of Its Kind, Surprising Astronomers
  • Game Theory Promised To Explain Human Decisions. Did It?
  • Genes, Hormones, And Hairstyling – Here Are Some Causes Of Hair Loss You Might Not Have Heard Of
  • Answer To 30-Year-Old Mystery Code Embedded In The Kryptos CIA Sculpture To Be Sold At Auction
  • Merry Mice: Human Brain Cells Transplanted Into Mice Reduce Anxiety And Depression
  • Asteroid-Bound NASA Mission Snaps Earth-Moon Portrait From 290 Million Kilometers Away
  • Forget State Mammals – Some States Have Official Dinosaurs, And They’re Awesome
  • Female Jumping Spiders Of Two Species Prefer The Sexy Red Males Of One, Leading To Hybridization
  • Why Is It So Difficult To Find New Moons In The Solar System?
  • New “Oxygen-Breathing” Crystal Could Recharge Fuel Cells And More
  • Some Gut Bacteria Cause Insomnia While Others Protect Against It, 400,000-Person Study Argues
  • Neanderthals And Homo Sapiens Got It On 100,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought
  • “Womb Of The Universe”: Native American Tribal Elders Help Archaeologists Decipher Ancient Rock Art In Missouri Cave
  • 16,000-Year-Old Paintings Suggest Prehistoric Humans Risked Their Lives To Enter “Shaman Training Cave”
  • Final Gasps Of A Dying Star Seen Through A Record-Breaking 130 Years Of Data
  • COVID-19 “Vaccine Alternative” Injection Could Be On Fast-Track To Approval From FDA
  • New Jersey Officials Investigate Possible First Locally Acquired Malaria Case Since 1991
  • First-of-Its-Kind Bright Orange Nurse Shark Recorded Off Costa Rica Makes History
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version