Winds on Mars can both help and hurt spacecraft.
So we're getting really creative in how to study winds on
the surface of Mars over a large region.
We're here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in the Space
Flight Operations Facility, also known as the Dark Room.
This is where engineers send commands and receive data
from JPL missions, including NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Now, detailed images from the orbiter are helping
scientists better understand Martian winds.
Leslie Tamppari is MRO's deputy project scientist.
Leslie, what are we seeing in these images?
So what you can see here are dark patches
on the surface of the ice near the south polar region,
and they're created by gas jets that come from under that ice,
up through cracks and deliver that dust out onto the ice.
And the wind will carry that dust and lay it on the surface
forming these bands.
And what we can do with this information is
we can look at the directions and the sizes
and we can try to understand what the wind field is doing.
And I understand that volunteers played a large role
in this research. Yes, they did.
We have taken about 75,000 images
over all of Mars with our MRO HiRISE camera.
We used citizen scientists, 80,000 volunteers
to map these fans and map their directions and sizes.
Why is it important to study wind direction on Mars?
Some of our landers and rovers have had wind measurements,
but only in a few locations at a few different times.
But winds are very important for understanding
today's climate on Mars,
but also for trying to understand
how the climate was different in the past.
We also have huge dust storms that occur on Mars sometimes,
but we don't understand
why some storms become global and some don't.
So we're trying to understand the wind field
to try to put all these pieces
together, to understand Mars better.
And how does that information help protect NASA's spacecraft?
Right.
It's very important for not only the spacecraft,
but probably future human exploration as well,
because dust, it can be dangerous to hardware
For example, on the Perseverance rover,
we are fortunate enough to have a wind sensor
and we're measuring dust devils and a couple of these dust
devils and wind events were so large
they picked up
not only dust but bigger particles, sand sized particles
And in fact, some of the wind sensors
were damaged on the Perseverance rover.
In other locations, we seen hardly any dust devils.
For example, the InSight lander has solar panels.
The solar panels are
completely covered with dust, and so the power is waning.
And we'd really like to see some dust devils coming by
so that they could clean up those solar panels
and provide InSight with some more power.
So learning about the winds and the different environments
and how they change across Mars will really help us plan
not only for the conditions for today's spacecraft there,
but also plan better for the future.
Thank you, Leslie.
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