Throughout 2022, the POT made great discoveries with his telescopes and the different missions that it carries out in space. Now, days before the end of the year, surprised again by capturing a dust tornado that “devoured” the rover perseverance In mars.
The United States space agency was able to capture, for the first time, the sound of a swirl of dust on the red planet when it passed over the rover in a Jezero crater. This discovery will allow us to better understand the atmosphere of the red planet and its climate.
In this crater, specialists have observed signs of almost 100 dust tornadoes. However, this is the first recording of the sound of this phenomenon and it was possible thanks to the SuperCam instrument.
NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a “duck” on Mars
This microphone records about three minutes every two days and was on at the time the eddy passed over the spacecraft, so the recording was almost by chance.
In this regard, the planetologist and director of the investigation Naomi Murdoch assured: “We had a one in 200 chance of registering it.”.
In this sense, he explained that despite the fact that “there was a lot of organization”, also “you have to be lucky”since it is unknown exactly when these phenomena occur, according to the article published in the scientific journal nature communications.
They discover that the impact of an asteroid on Mars due to a “megatsunami”
The characteristics of the dust swirl on Mars
Specialists from the University of Toulouse, France, managed to calculate the characteristics of the dust tornadocrossing the recordings with data from multisensors and different models.
In this way, they found that the whirlpool was 25 meters wide, that is, almost 10 times the size of the robot and, in turn, was 118 meters high.
These eddies are common on Mars and indicate atmospheric turbulence. This phenomenon constitutes an important mechanism for raising the dust cycle in the Martian territory.
MoC/CCM
You may also like
