Future human visitors to Mars will have to deal with an unfriendly planet. It’s dusty. It’s windy. Sometimes those two factors come together in a swirling spectacle. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured a group of dust devils out for a dance across the red planet’s surface. Be forewarned there’s some dust-devil cannibalism.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory shared the rover’s extraordinary view in a video released on April 3. The images come from late January.
The video shows several dusty twisters swirling across the landscape. The largest one closest to the rover measured 210 feet in width. That’s about the wingspan of a 747 airplane. Look for two other obvious dust devils in the background.
You might think a jumbo dust devil on Mars would fling you around like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” but that’s not the case. “If you were standing there, not to worry,” said atmospheric scientist Priya Patel in the video. “The Martian atmosphere is so thin that it would feel like a gust of wind, though you’d get pretty dirty.”
There’s a sneaky fourth dust devil in the video. A smaller puff can be seen trailing the closest twister. The larger dust devil ate up the daintier one, which was just 16 feet wide. “If two dust devils happen upon each other, they can either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker,” Perseverance scientist Mark Lemmon said in a NASA statement.
It’s a dust-devil-eat-dust-devil world on Mars. “If you feel bad for the little devil in our latest video, it may give you some solace to know the larger perpetrator most likely met its own end a few minutes later,” said Lemmon. “Dust devils on Mars only last about 10 minutes.”
Mars Dust Devils
The big dust devil in the video is reminiscent of a well-known sighting from 2012 when NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft saw a real whopper from up above. That dust devil’s plume was about 210 feet wide, much like the one Perseverance saw. However, MRO’s dust devil measured out at around 12 miles high. That’s roughly the height of two Mount Everests stacked on top of each other.
Studying dust devils is about more than the wow factor of these wild whirlwinds cavorting across the landscape. They can help scientists understand wind patterns, surface-atmosphere interactions and climate. “Every time we spot a dust devil, it helps us refine our climate models of Mars,” Patel said.
Beyond Mars Dust Devils
Perseverance is exploring the rim of the Jezero Crater. It landed inside the crater in early 2021 and spent its time examining an ancient river delta and collecting rock samples. It took an epic climb, but the rover made it to the rim late in 2024. Scientists were eager to get a closer look at unusual formations that had only been seen from above by orbiting spacecraft.
The crater rim is a whole new adventure. Percy recently spotted a strange rock packed with spherules and scientists hope to figure out where it came from. The rover is continuing its rock-collecting hobby by taking samples from the rim and sealing them in tubes. NASA hopes to send a future mission to retrieve the rover’s samples and bring them back to Earth for closer study.
The samples could be key to answering our most pressing Mars question: Did the red planet once host microbial life? Mars was a much more watery place long ago and NASA rovers have spotted intriguing hints of possible ancient life. The rovers are rolling laboratories, but they’re not equipped to find a definitive answer. For that, we need laboratories and scientists on Earth.
NASA’s current rovers, Perseverance and Curiosity, are built to withstand the dusty Mars environment. Both use a nuclear power source so they don’t end up defunct like the solar-powered Opportunity rover. Opportunity succumbed to a planet-wide dust storm that kicked up in 2018. That storm makes Perseverance’s Mars dust devils look pretty tame by comparison.
