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While searching for the possibility of past life on Mars, NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover spotted a giant Martian storm.
Reaching a height of about 1.2 miles (2 km), the base of this swirling vortex is visible in the footage below. Dust devils often roam the Martian desert, though this sturdy dust devil is about 200 feet tall.
NASA’s rover has found the place where unusual events took place on Mars.
The vortex traveled at 12 mph, but in this 21-frame video, its speed has increased. You can see it coming down the hill at the top of the shot:
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The Perseverance rover is exploring Jezero Crater on Mars, the site of a once roaring river delta that was filled with water. It’s now a bone-dry world—1,000 times drier than Earth’s driest desert—with no shortage of red dust to circulate in the atmosphere.
A NASA robot is now approaching an area where planetary scientists suspect that lake water once lapped the coast about 3 billion years ago. The space agency explained that today, the minerals left on the ancient beach “are an excellent means of preserving evidence of ancient life if it had existed”.
So get ready for more science: “Mars 2020 scientists have been buzzing with excitement for the past week. Persistence makes its final approach to a particular rock unit that was instrumental in selecting Jezero as the landing site for the probe,” NASA said.
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Mars is the only world that NASA is actively exploring with rovers. But the space agency has plans to probe other worlds that could be harbors. Current Conditions for life to develop. These include Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s enchanted moons like Europa — a place where scientists recently found an element essential for life (as we know it, that is).
