Posted on 04/05/2012 7:31:35 AM PDT by Red Badger
A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles high (20 kilometers) was captured whirling its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14. It was imaged by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its height, the plume is little more than three-quarters of a football field wide (70 yards, or 70 meters).
Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust they pull off the ground. Unlike a tornado, a dust devil typically forms on a clear day when the ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground. As heated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above it, the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.
The image was taken during late northern spring, two weeks short of the northern summer solstice, a time when the ground in the northern mid-latitudes is being heated most strongly by the sun.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining the Red Planet with six science instruments since 2006. Now in an extended mission, the orbiter continues to provide insights into the planet's ancient environments and how processes such as wind, meteorite impacts and seasonal frosts continue to affect the Martian surface today. This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other orbital and surface missions combined.
More than 21,700 images taken by HiRISE are available for viewing on the instrument team's website: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu . Each observation by this telescopic camera covers several square miles, or square kilometers, and can reveal features as small as a desk.
More information: For more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see http://www.nasa.gov/mro
Provided by JPL/NASA
I sat in a west Oklahoma Pizza Hut watching what I then thought was a large dust devil dance around a field. Guess I was wrong; it didn’t come anywhere close to 12 miles high. Gak.
Tornadoes have been observed to have and electrical component and may be a form of plasma discharge to the upper atmosphere occurring at a much slower rate than lightning.
Maybe it was related to the hybrid Tasmanian Devil/Rock Eater? (Rocky Tasmanian Devil Eater?) (Eating Tasmanian Rock Devil?)
They look like girly-boys to me...
Mars is not part of O'Reilly's "no-spin" zone.
Yet another reason why Venus is a better place to colonize. Even a twelve-mile high dust devil would still be twenty-three miles below the basement.
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