Have you seen a dust devil before? Have you wondered if they exist on Mars? Listen to our mini podcast about how dust devils were seen on Mars and how they helped our rovers.
To learn more about the events discussed, click here.
Special thanks to Kjartan Kinch, Nicole Schmitz and resources from KMRE – Spark Radio & Western Washington University
Image Courtesy of NASA
Click Here for Transcript
[♪ Gershon Kingsley playing Popcorn ♪]
Regina DeGraaff: Hello and welcome back to Spacecraft Chronicles, a show where we explore stories of past, present, and future space missions.
I’m your host, Regina Barber DeGraaff, an astrophysicist and planetary enthusiast. Today’s episode is all about dust devils on Mars. Just like on Earth, dust devils tend to form in flat, barren terrains, during days with clear skies and negligible wind.
The extreme difference between atmospheric temperature and ground temperature is what eventually causes a dust devil to form.
Mars fits all of these requirements perfectly. However, there is a major difference between the dust devils on Mars and those on Earth — their size.
Dust devils here on Earth are rarely larger than a few meters tall, or 10 feet. But on Mars they can grow to be over 50 times as wide and 100 times as tall, according to NASA.
Dust devil tracks were first spotted in 1970 by NASA’s Viking orbiters. However, the dust devils themselves were not photographed until the Mars exploration rover, Spirit. One was caught by accident and was seen by scientist, Kjartan Kinch.
Kjartan Kinch: My name is Kjartan Kinch and I am from Denmark and I work at the University of Copenhagen. I worked on the Mars mission that was called Mars Exploration Rovers, when I was pretty young.
Regina DeGraaff: Which mission was this?
Kjartan Kinch: This was the Spirit rover. I worked as what we called a [inaudible] person. I looked at camera images and was one of the first people that had eyes on the new images that were coming from Mars. To check that everything was alright with the camera and that we got the images that we had told the rover to take. But just sort of the rush of being the first and sometimes seeing things that we weren’t expecting.
There was one time when we were taking a panorama — so we were taking a whole bunch of images of the landscape from a hill top — and the way that the camera had to work when it was taking panoramas — that camera, it could only do one color at a time. So you had a bunch of different color filters, but just if you wanted like red, green, or blue, you’d have to first take the red image, and then the green, and then the blue.
And I got the images and I started looking at them and I noticed that there was a dust devil that we had just randomly caught. And I first looked at the picture in color. There was this weird thing going on cause it was not in the same place. Then I went to the separate images and looked at them, and you can actually kind of work out how fast it was moving and stuff.
Regina DeGraaff: Soon after, scientists learned dust devils could also be very helpful to the maintenance of the rovers themselves. Due to the conditions on Mars, dust would eventually cover the solar panels on the rover, and slowly kill the robot’s power source.
Here is Nicole Schmitz, an aerospace engineer for the German Aerospace Center Institute of Planetary Researcher to tell us about one of these times.
Nicole Schmitz: So I was, as a student, involved in the very early phase of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, just a few months after landing. And my supervisor was a participating scientist on the team who was sitting in Germany. We had a direct connection to JPL. So we got the data at the same time.
And I remember that I had been told at the very beginning of that mission that the idea was that they would only survive for three months because there was a concern that solar panels would just dust up. Dust would collect on top of them and that means that you wouldn’t charge them as efficiently anymore, of course.
So I remember seeing this data from the solar panels, from the efficiency going down and down and down and down. And it got worse and worse and worse. And at some point, that curve just went up — all the way up again to full charge and nobody knew why.
And I can tell that just from my perspective in Germany, listening to people discussing about possible reasons. And I remember that there was one person was even suggesting that there might have been Martians being hired to clean the solar panel cause we just had that image with the clear, clean solar panels, but no real explanation for that.
But a couple of days — I think — later, there were suddenly some images appearing which showed dust devils. So suddenly there was sort of the theory that there was just dust devils going over the rovers and cleaning the solar panels, and that turned out to be true in the end. That was really fantastic and it still happens.
Regina DeGraaff: And that’s why these rovers can last for so long — because of these dust devils.
Nicole Schmitz: Yeah.
[♪ Gershon Kingsley playing Popcorn ♪]
Regina DeGraaff: Dust devils on Mars have proven to be centerpieces of excitement for researchers and the public alike, from their first sightings, to saving the lives of unsuspecting rovers.
[♪ Gershon Kingsley playing Popcorn ♪]
Thank you for listening to this episode and be sure to tune in next time for another space story. This episode of Space Craft Chronicles was produced, written, and edited by Taylor Raybould and Regina Barber DeGraff. This show was produced in collaboration with KMRE, Spark Radio, and Western Washington University.
It was recorded on the campus of Western Washington University in the summer of 2016 at a Mastcam-Z conference. Special thanks to Kjartan Kinch and Nicole Schmitz.
[♪ Gershon Kingsley playing Popcorn ♪]
[End of podcast.]