14 DAY TRIAL // Mars is famous among astronomers and planetary scientists for its dust storms. In fact, it would appear that its atmosphere is a lot more active than anyone thought. This was made evident some time ago, when the rover Spirit first saw a dust devil, and imaged it in several color filters before the formation disappeared. Now, its twin robot Opportunity has done the same thing. The event represents the first time that the NASA rover managed to see such a feature, at the latitudes it roams.
Unlike Spirit, this particular explorations robot does not need to hibernate during winter. It surveys the Red Planet at a latitude that allows it to receive sufficient amounts of sunlight throughout the Martian year, and so it has been conducting non-stop observations of the soil and atmosphere around its locations for more than six and a half years. Researchers have been looking for interesting atmospheric features to train Opportunity's robotic cameras on, but until this month they were unable to find anything.
“This is the first dust devil seen by Opportunity,” explains Texas A&M in College Station professor Mark Lemmon. He is a member of the science team that handles the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission. The recent image Opportunity sent back features a very tall column of swirling dust – commonly known as a devil – at center-stage. The photograph was not taken on purpose. Mission managers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, planned to use it to inform their drivers on the next direction they need to set the rover on. Before snapping the image, Opportunity had just finished a 70-meter (230-foot) drive, heading east-southeastward.
“That might have just been a coincidence, but there could be a connection,” Lemmon adds. He says that the science team is finally resuming its search for dust devils, after more than three years of rest. The expert says that the explorations robot will use its navigations camera to spot the atmospheric features. Opportunity and Spirit arrived on Mars in January 2004 for missions designed to last for three months. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the two robots for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, at the agency's Headquarters, in Washington DC.