The twin Mars rover Spirit has discovered some dust sprites, but while it is based in sand and does not make contact with Earth, Spirit is in an area free of sand and dust and is therefore less affected by these phenomena
A giant plume of dust appeared in a routine image by Opportunity's panoramic camera on July 15. The vehicle took the picture in the direction of travel - west southwest, after traveling 70 meters. The photo was taken to plan the further journey of the car.
"This is the first dust elf to see Opportunity," says Mark Lemon of Texas A&M University, and a member of the robots' scientific team. The area where the spirit vehicle is currently stuck inside the Gusev Crater, is an area with more difficult ground formations, and more dust than the meridian plane where the Optorionity operates. These factors in Gusev allowed wind gusts to form more easily and raise much more dust compared to conditions in Meridian, Lemon explained.
The Martian probes also photographed tracks of dust elves near Opterioniti many times, but the tracks were relatively few compared to those near Spirit. Winds swirling in a meridian plane may be more common than the visual signs of their existence, if the wind blows when there is no free dust to disturb it.
Just one day before the photo was taken, the wind cleaned some of the dust that had accumulated on the vehicle's solar collectors, increasing the energy output from the solar collector by more than 10%. "It may be a coincidence, but there may be a connection," said Lemon. The team resumed the systematic tests for the detection of dust sprites in the afternoon hours with Opportunity's navigation camera, for the first time in three years.
An attempt to communicate with spirit
And in the meantime there is bad news from the Spirit which, as mentioned, has been stuck in the sand for over a year. The car has been in hibernation for many weeks, and the control room people still haven't heard from it. Even though the vehicle experienced one of the most severe winters since its arrival. Control staff members began using a beeper technique known as "sweep and beep" in order to communicate with Spirit instead of just passively listening to it to detect signals of activity. Based on a weather model from Adimai and its effect on the energy level, mission control managers believe that if Spirit responds, it will almost certainly happen within a few months. However, hoping for the best, they are preparing for the worst - although they emphasize that there is a low probability that Spirit will never respond again."
However, Doug McCuistron, director of NASA's Discovery Program, said that Spirit has never experienced such harsh conditions - for us it is an unknown country."
Spirit and Opportunity arrived at Mars in January 2004 for missions that were planned to last three months. JPL manages the mission for NASA
For a press release from NASA and the University of Texas
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Have you ever driven on the Negev roads?
Have you ever seen a small, harmless tornado of dust swirling around? It's a dust elf.
The importance of this thing is not great - it reveals to us two things we already knew - that there is dust on Mars and there is also wind there.
What is a dust elf? What is the importance of this thing?
It's always fun to hear about our sophisticated machines on distant planets. What is the scientific significance of another dust elf? It's not entirely clear to me. What's more, life seekers in the future will surely marvel at the ancient technologies they will find on Mars millions or billions of years from now, if the solar system survives and is explored one day.
I hope that all these pieces of information that are collected undergo intelligent analyzes that will help both in the construction of the following vehicles and in the choices of landing locations or arrival destinations.