NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captures a 1.2 mile-high ghostly ‘dust devil’ as it moves across the surface of the Red Planet

Dust devils – vertical columns of hot air and particles – may seem like a weather phenomenon found only on Earth. 

But new footage captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover shows one measuring a whopping 1.2 miles high on the Martian surface. 

Perseverance captured the dust devil as it was moving east to west at about 12 miles per hour at Thorofare Ridge, located on the western rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater. 

It was about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away from the six-wheeled rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.

As well as collecting rock samples and making oxygen, Perseverance acts as a pair of eyes on Mars so scientists can learn about the planet’s weather from 230 million miles away.

The clip – which has the speed altered to show the devil’s progress – is composed of 21 frames taken four seconds apart, according to NASA.  

In a blog post, scientists at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) explained that the dust devil was captured by one of Perseverance’s ‘Navcams’. 

These black-and-white navigational cameras, mounted at the top of the rover’s long ‘neck’, use visible light to gather panoramic 3D imagery. 

Although only the bottom 387 feet (118 meters) of the swirling vortex were visible in the camera frame, scientists used the dust devil’s shadow to estimate its full height as 1.2 miles (2 kilometers).

‘We don’t see the top of the dust devil, but the shadow it throws gives us a good indication of its height,’ said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and a member of the Perseverance science team. 

‘Most are vertical columns; if this dust devil were configured that way, its shadow would indicate it is about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) in height.’ 

The sped-up clip was captured on August 30, the 899th Martian day, or ‘sol’, of the Perseverance mission.

One sol consists of 24 hours and 37 minutes – so slightly longer than one Earth day. 

As on Earth, dust devils form when rising cells of warm air mix with descending columns of cooler air, carrying dust and debris as they go. 

But the Martian versions can grow to be much larger than those found on Earth, due to the lower gravity and abundance of dust on our neighbouring planet. 

Dust devils are also most prominent during the spring and summer months when temperatures are warmer.

This is because the hot air near the ground rises quickly through the cooler air above, which can trigger the upward current of air.

Mars’ northern hemisphere, where Perseverance is located, is currently in summer. 

Perseverance has been tasked to look in all directions for dust devils to help scientists on the ground track Martian weather. 

It’s taking images in black-and-white to reduce the amount of data sent to Earth, which means less of a wait to see what Perseverance is seeing.  

But the rover’s key objective is to seek traces of fossilised microbial life and gather rock specimens for return to Earth. 

For more than two years it has been busy trundling around the Jezero Crater collecting rocky samples and placing them in a titanium tube. 

Jezero Crater was the chosen location as scientists believe the area was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta. 

Secrets about this body of water, if it did exist, could be locked away in the rock samples, ready for scientists on Earth to unravel. 

However, Perseverance is not bringing the samples back to Earth – the rover is stashing the tubes in certain locations for them to be collected by a highly ambitious retrieval mission. 

This joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) is currently in development – although reportedly it’s not making much progress. 

A report released last week by NASA’s Institutional Review Board suggested it is danger of not launching due to costs and ‘complexities’. 

It said: ‘There is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.’