NASA’s Perseverance rover recently captured the Mars drama on camera where a dust devil enveloped its miniature brother in a titanic whirlwind of dust and air. The rover that has been examining the Jezero Crater on Mars was experimenting on imaging to study the atmosphere on Mars when it caught the strange moment of encounter between two dust devils.
Using its navigation camera, Perseverance captured a series of pictures recording several whirling dust devils along the west rim of Jezero Crater in Witch Hazel Hill. In perhaps the most visually spectacular shot, a larger dust devil, approximately 210 feet (65 meters) wide, engulfed a smaller dust devil only 16 feet (5 meters) wide. The smaller twister was consumed and engulfed by the larger one, leaving an interesting whirl of dust in the Martian air.
These dust devils, or convective vortices, are common on the Martian surface. Mark Lemmon, a researcher with Perseverance at the Space Science Institute, explained that these mini-twisters travel across the Martian terrain, lifting dust and degrading visibility. When two dust devils collide with each other, they bump into each other and destroy or merge into a larger vortex. In this case, the mini dust devil died by being engulfed by its large twin.
Dust devils have long intrigued scientists. The first ones were spotted by NASA’s Viking mission in the 1970s, and the Pathfinder mission captured the first image of a dust devil from Mars’s surface two decades later. NASA’s rovers, including Perseverance, have since provided numerous images and data on these phenomena. In contrast to Earth’s tornadoes, the Martian atmosphere is too thin to support such destructive storms, but it can form dust devils when heating air rises, turns, and forms these dust clouds.
Whereas the smaller dust devil met a tragic end, Lemmon soothed it by adding that the bigger dust devil probably broke up shortly after the accident. Mars’ dust devils only survive for 10 minutes, so the bigger vortex probably broke up not long after consuming the smaller one.
This is not Perseverance’s initial encounter with dust devils. The rover was able to trap a cloud of them in September of 2021 and became the first to record the sound of one on Mars with its SuperCam microphone.
