After seeing the photo, I felt I had to share the link.
I just find stuff like this incredibly cool.
That’s a dust devil on another planet. That’s just incredible.
And it’s HUGE!
There’s a cool new movie of the dust devils, too. It’s a bit like the older one you may have seen on the JPL web site in the past. Check out the link (with nested link to the actual animation) here.
That was just too effing 
.
That means there is wind on Mars. Something all the pictures don’t really illustrate. Very cool. I guess you could fly a kite on Mars.
Yeah, but what if those aren’t just dust devils but really invisible Martians spinning past the snoopy humans camera??? :eek:
JPL has been posting these bad boys for some time. I have the Mars Rover site bookmarked for this very reason. And yes, it is very cool.
I may be mistaken, but, it looks to me, if you look closely, you’ll actually see two of them, one waaaaay behind the other one…
Way Cool, Thank you Loopydude
Behind the elephant?
Damn, those things are cool looking on Earth. Elsewhere…whoa. Cool beyond words.
Yeah, if I’d read the article completely (I just hit the link and drooled), I’d have realised the reason it looked familiar is this is the original animation, without conrast enhancement. I actually think it looks better than the vsn. originally posted.
Yeah, there is one to the right and closer to the horizon.
I’m not sure what direction we’re looking, but I think it’s generally northward over Gusev, with the Tennessee Valley stretching off to the left, the north ridge of the further Tennessee Valley wall in the front foreground, and Clark Hill just beyond it. From what I remember, Husband Hill (which we’re near the top of, in this photo) is about 90m tall (or around 300’). Clark Hill is maybe two thirds that height, so put it around 200’ tall, as a rough guestimate. So how big does that make the dust devil? I have no idea how far away it is, so it makes it tough to be sure, but I’m guessing the part we can see is approaching 1000’ tall. So that thing must could be a couple thousand feet in height, at least, maybe several. Do dust devils on Earth get that big? I’ve only seen little dinky ones in vacant lots and whatnot. I’ve never, say, been on a ridge over a dry lakebed in the Mojave watching dust devils go by, so I’ve no first-hand experience with the scales involved here.
I’m sure you could, but it would probably be a strange experience. With 1/3 the gravity, and 1/100th the atomospheric density of Earth, kite dynamics would probably seem pretty languid, even in a high-speed gale, as the apparent velocity of the wind is proportional to the square root of its density (I think, anyway, given the relationship of velocity pressure to velocity and how that relates to the workings of a manometer). So a 100kph wind on Mars is going to feel like a 10kph wind on Earth. A typical Earth kite might be too heavy to get much loft; a Mars-engineered kite would have a larger area, and be constructed of lighter materials, I’m guessing. And when the wind gave out, it would fall rather slowly compared to what we’re used to on Earth. I bet it would be really wild to fly a kite from Husband Hill!
The whole idea of flying a kite on Mars is very surreal to me. Just the idea that you could stand there, and fly a kite, and YOU’RE ON MARS! I agree with you that the kite would have to be constructed differently, but I’m curious as to how that would affect other things like paper airplanes, gliders or paragliding. THAT would be real cool, paragliding on Mars.
Havn’t been to Mojave, but the rocky-type desert area north of Moab is prime dust devil territory.
It’s really hard to get a perspective and scale on something tranlucent in the middle of flat red dirt, But I’ve seen a couple that I’m sure were 1000 ft. A couple that may be way beyond that, but then again it could have been missed perception of how far away they were. I used to have one really cool picture of at least 20 devils, with a couple monsters, but it was pre digital, and I lost it somewhere.
Oh great. We spend all that money to get up there and it is just like Kansas. Remember fucking Kansas?
Suhweet picture! The cool thing about flying a kite on mars: No trees to get it tangled up in. Somebody tell Charlie Brown.
'Course, when Lucy pulls the football, Charlie will fly a country kilometer.