Dust Devil Tracks
Many areas on Mars, including Eridania, experience the passage of giant dust devils. A thin coating of fine bright dust covers most of the Martian surface. When a dust devil goes by it blows away the coating and exposes the underlying dark surface.
Dust devils occur when the sun warms up the air near a flat, dry surface. The warm air then rises quickly through the cooler air and begins spinning while moving ahead. This spinning, moving cell may pick up dust and sand then leave behind a clean surface.
Dust devils have been seen from the ground and high overhead from orbit. They have even blown the dust off of the solar panels of the two Rovers on Mars, thereby greatly extending their lives. The twin Rovers were designed to last for 3 months, instead they lasted more than six years, and one is still going after 8 years. The pattern of the tracks have been shown to change every few months.
A study that combined data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) found that some large dust devils on Mars have a diameter of 700 meters and last at least 26 minutes.
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Kepler (Martian crater) showing dust devil tracks, as seen by Mars Global Surveyor.
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Pattern of large and small tracks made by giant dust devils as seen by Mars Global Surveyor, under the MOC Public Targeting Program.
Read more about this topic: Eridania Quadrangle
Famous quotes containing the words dust, devil and/or tracks:
“And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the
tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored
taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous
to demand the time of the day.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)