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.

ID: PSP_009819_2130
date: 30 August 2008
altitude: 294 km

https://uahirise.org/hipod/PSP_009819_2130
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
#Mars #science #NASA