Mojave Desert dust devils give clues to exploring Mars

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Dust devils in the Mojave Desert could protect future expeditions to Mars, according to a new study.

Scientists say that similar types of dust devils to those seen in the Mojave are also found on Mars at sizes reaching up to a MILE in diameter on the red planet.

They believe that identifying and characterizing dust devils on Earth can inform their formation and life cycles on Mars - where dust storms can make or break missions.

Dust devils form in the Mojave Desert when the sun beats down on the ground and makes pockets of low pressure. Cool air rushes into those areas, where it warms and rises, creating vortices that pick up dust.

Researchers say that dust devils could play a large role in the Martian climate, and they are "crucial" to understand during missions to the red planet.

Louis Urtecho of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "The abundance of dust devils on Mars could have implications for the lifetimes of many missions.

"In fact, dust devils have already played a role in past missions. Opportunity and Spirit rovers' lives were extended because friendly dust devils blew dust off their solar panels.

"But Opportunity eventually succumbed to a global dust storm on Mars, showing the importance of dust loading in the atmosphere."

It is difficult to find and study dust devils on Mars, so Urtecho and his team hope to study them on Earth, then extend the analysis to scale for the different atmosphere.

Based on microbarometer data from the Mojave Desert, they built an algorithm to look for the pressure activity indicative of a dust devil.

The vortices have a distinct drop in pressure near their centers, and their pressure fluctuates to look like an electrocardiogram (EKG) signal over time.

Urtecho said: "The hope is that with our dust devil detector we will be able to learn more about the formation characteristics of convective vortices and how they move across various landscapes."

"This will improve the accuracy of Martian weather models, which has a direct impact not only in understanding dust cycles on Mars and the role they have played in its evolution, but also the operation of future robotic and possibly crewed missions."

He presented the findings at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Nashville.