NASA’s Perseverance rover watches as 2 Mars dust devils merge into 1 (video)

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured a giant dust devil devouring a smaller storm swirling close behind it on the rim of Jezero Crater.

Martian dust devils are spinning columns of warm air that pick up dust and debris as they move across the surface of the Red Planet. Perseverance spied the two merging storms on Jan. 25, while exploring the western rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater at a location called “Witch Hazel Hill.”

“Convective vortices — aka dust devils — can be rather fiendish,” Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement from NASA sharing the video footage of the merging storms.

“These mini-twisters wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering the visibility in their immediate area,” Lemmon added. “If two dust devils happen upon each other, they can either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker.”

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Perseverance captured images of the Red Planet storms using one of its navigation cameras. The rover was about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from the two merging storms, which were approximately 16 feet (5 meters) wide and 210 feet (65 m) wide, respectively.

“Dust devils play a significant role in Martian weather patterns,” Katie Stack Morgan, project scientist for the Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in the statement. “Dust devil study is important because these phenomena indicate atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing wind directions and speed, and are responsible for about half the dust in the Martian atmosphere.”

In addition to the two merging dust storms captured in the video foreground, two other dust devils can be seen in the background to the left and center, highlighting just how frequently such storms occur on Mars.