Seasons change on Mars too, and in November 2021 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked at how its fleet of spacecraft studies Martian weather — and copes with it. Much of the report uses NASA's Eyes, a visualization showing where the agency's rovers and lander are on the planet.
Weather from the surface
- Perseverance, in Jezero crater, was exploring in early summer. Its Mars Environmental Dynamic Analyzer (MEDA) measures temperature, humidity and wind speed and direction. Its wind sensors also gauge how much dust is in the air and how large the particles are, helping scientists understand the dust cycle and its effect on weather. MEDA also gives the Ingenuity helicopter critical weather forecasts before each flight.
- Curiosity, in Gale crater in the southern hemisphere, was in early winter. Its Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) delivers daily weather reports and regular dust surveys that track seasonal change over time.
A harder summer for Ingenuity
Warmer temperatures and a thinning atmosphere had made it harder for Ingenuity to generate enough lift. To fly in the thinner summer air, the helicopter raised its rotor speed from 2,537 to 2,700 revolutions per minute.
A marsquake
The InSight lander studies what happens below the surface. In September it recorded one of the biggest and longest-lasting marsquakes it had ever detected: a magnitude 4.2 quake whose seismic waves shook the lander for nearly an hour and a half.
Storms from above
Orbiters — Odyssey, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN) and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — track the scope and scale of storms from overhead. MRO produces a daily global weather map, and its cameras also return striking images, including recent pictures of dunes.
Sources
- NASA/JPL-Caltech, "How's the Weather on Mars? (NASA Mars Report)," November 15, 2021, NASA Image and Video Library: https://images.nasa.gov/details/JPL-20211115-MARSf-0001-Hows%20the%20Weather%20on%20Mars
- Credits listed with the film: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/ASU/MSSS.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from images.nasa.gov
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