The Jezero Crater – an area that planetary scientists suspect was once full of water – is proving to be an extremely dynamic, dusty world. “The Jezero Crater may be one of the most active sources of dust on the planet,” said Manuel de la Torre Juarez, a NASA scientist working on the Perseverance mission. The Space Agency recently released footage of this powerful, swirling dust devil activity in the crater, recorded in July 2021. You can see a number of dust devils spinning simultaneously across the landscape, both in the foreground and on the red hills in the distance. . Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI SEE ALSO: Earthquake “Monster” on Mars shows that the red planet is not nearly dead Every day, at least four of these vortices pass near the rover. They are formed when the ground becomes warmer than the air, heating the air above it. The upstream currents rise while the colder air then sinks, creating air that circulates vertically. Dust devils on Mars, however, can be much larger than those on Earth. Sometimes, the Perseverance rover also detects gusts of wind that raise dust clouds in the Martian sky. “The largest of them created a huge cloud covering 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers),” NASA said. At times, large regional or planetary dust storms can cover the red planet. Understanding how intense dust activity occurs in the Jezero Crater (perhaps the rough surface helps the wind lift the dust into the air) can help mission planners predict these intense weather events. Sometimes dust storms can be so intense that they block sunlight from reaching the surface, turning day into night. It’s a serious matter for robotic exploration missions – or perhaps future human missions – that rely on sunlight for power. The dust is so merciless that it eventually lost light of NASA’s legendary rover Opportunity and the robot was left without power. Engineers could not reactivate the robot. But about 2 billion years ago, Mars may not have been the extremely dusty earth it is today. The water was flowing to the surface and Perseverance is now looking for evidence of ancient life that may have inhabited this once wet world.
