A Dust Devil on Hilly Terrain
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
A Dust Devil on Hilly Terrain
PSP_009819_2130  Science Theme: Landscape Evolution
There are many dust devils on Mars—little twisters that raise dust from the surface. They have also cleaned dust off of the solar panels of the rovers Opportunity and Spirit, improving the solar power production. (Spirit became stuck in 2009 and ceased communication a year later, while Opportunity went silent in June 2018.)

HiRISE sees many dust-devil tracks on Mars, but rarely captures an active feature because the images cover such small areas and because the typical time of day near 3 p.m. is past the peak heating and dust-devil activity. In this 2008 image in the Amazonis region, we got lucky, although not lucky enough to capture the whole swirl in the color strip.

Written by: Alfred McEwen  (15 February 2017)
 
Acquisition date
30 August 2008

Local Mars time
15:24

Latitude (centered)
32.849°

Longitude (East)
199.486°

Spacecraft altitude
294.4 km (183.0 miles)

Original image scale range
from 29.5 cm/pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) to 58.9 cm/pixel (with 2 x 2 binning)

Map projected scale
25 cm/pixel and North is up

Map projection
Equirectangular

Emission angle
0.3°

Phase angle
46.4°

Solar incidence angle
46°, with the Sun about 44° above the horizon

Solar longitude
120.0°, Northern Summer

For non-map projected images
North azimuth:  97°
Sub-solar azimuth:  4.6°
JPEG
Black and white
map projected  non-map

IRB color
map projected  non-map

Merged IRB
map projected

Merged RGB
map projected

RGB color
non-map projected

JP2
Black and white
map-projected   (1464MB)

IRB color
map-projected   (759MB)

JP2 EXTRAS
Black and white
map-projected  (751MB)
non-map           (531MB)

IRB color
map projected  (296MB)
non-map           (622MB)

Merged IRB
map projected  (481MB)

Merged RGB
map-projected  (469MB)

RGB color
non map           (634MB)
BONUS
4K (TIFF)
8K (TIFF)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
B&W label
Color label
Merged IRB label
Merged RGB label
EDR products
HiView

NB
IRB: infrared-red-blue
RGB: red-green-blue
About color products (PDF)

Black & white is 5 km across; enhanced color about 1 km
For scale, use JPEG/JP2 black & white map-projected images

USAGE POLICY
All of the images produced by HiRISE and accessible on this site are within the public domain: there are no restrictions on their usage by anyone in the public, including news or science organizations. We do ask for a credit line where possible:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

POSTSCRIPT
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.