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:
“We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“He remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the mediaeval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The tracks of moose, more or less recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on the sides of the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous there now than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)