ExoMars TGO catches a dust devil on Mars

Dust devils are whirlwinds of dust that are blown across Mars’s surface. They are one way that dust gets lifted into the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere and transported from one place to another.

The Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on board ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) captured this dust devil tracking across the martian surface on 3 December 2021. The dust devil was one of 1039 found as part of new research published in Science Advances, which used 20 years of images from European Mars orbiters to trace strong surface winds on the Red Planet.

ExoMars TGO creates a single colour image by combining views from separate channels. By design, there is a delay of about one second between the individual views. This delay causes no problems as long as the surface is static, however it can cause slight ‘colour offsets’ in the final image whenever something is moving, such as clouds and dust devils. The researchers used this delay to measure the dust devil’s speed and direction.

Read more

[Image description: A colour satellite image of Mars showing a flat, dusty landscape with a faint, swirling dust devil – a small tornado-like column of dust – casting a subtle shadow as it moves across the surface. The dust devil appears as a light, vertical streak against the reddish-brown terrain, with nearby shallow craters and ridges visible.]