Dust Devil Tracks
Many areas on Mars, including the Hellas quadrangle, 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 have been seen from the ground and from orbiting spacecraft. 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 have lasted more than five years and are still going. 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.
Read more about this topic: Hellas Quadrangle
Famous quotes containing the words dust, devil and/or tracks:
“She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“When the Devil quotes Scriptures, it’s not, really, to deceive, but simply that the masses are so ignorant of theology that somebody has to teach them the elementary texts before he can seduce them.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on the marble....”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)