NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover sees dust devils swirling across Jezero Crater

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover saw some of the most intense dust activity during its first couple hundred days in Mars' Jezero Crater. According to a new study, the rover witnessed at least four dust devils - dust-bearing whirlwinds - swirling across Jezero Crater on a typical Martian day or sol.

The rover used its navigation camera and a suite of sensors, which are part of the spacecraft's weather instrumentation called MEDA, to capture the whirlwinds on the Red Planet. The cameras onboard the rover also documented three occasions in which wind gusts lifted large dust clouds, something called "gust-lifting events."

The Perseverance Mars rover's navigation camera captured the first such Martian wind-lifted dust cloud of a massive scale - estimated to be 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers) in size.

"We had a regional dust storm right on top of us in January, but we're still in the middle of dust season, so we're very likely to see more dust storms," said the paper's lead author, Claire Newman of Aeolis Research, a research company focused on planetary atmospheres.

"We think these gust-liftings are infrequent but could be responsible for a large fraction of the background dust that hovers all the time in the Martian atmosphere," Newman said.

According to Newman, the greater activity in Jezero could be due to factors such as the roughness of its surface, which can make it easier for the wind to lift dust.

During its first 216 days in Jezero Crater, @NASAPersevere saw some of the most intense dust activity ever witnessed by a mission sent to the Red Planet's surface. A study found that at least four dust devils pass by Perseverance on a typical Martian day! https://t.co/5vLqIYNI6W pic.twitter.com/Wq82uxyFPS

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) June 1, 2022

Launched on February 18, 2021, Perseverance's key goal is to look for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for a possible return to Earth. The rover's weather instrumentation - Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer or MEDA - includes wind sensors, light sensors that can detect whirlwinds as they scatter sunlight around the rover, and a sky-facing camera for capturing images of dust and clouds.