Left NavCam animation (heavily processed to reveal the activity)

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/j. Roger

Full size animation and source LINK

  • SpecialSetOfSieves@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Yep. We used to get satellite weather summaries fairly regularly, but Malin Space Science stopped publishing them a while back for some reason. Still, I find it pretty interesting to look at some of these old reports, if only to spin Mars around and see how pretty the planet would look from high orbit, with all those nearly-bluish cloud systems and muddy-looking dust raising events. The link shows what the planet looked like at this time (early spring) three Martian years ago:

    Looking towards the equatorial latitudes, the aphelion cloud belt proceeded to take hold with water ice clouds in abundance from Tharsis to Elysium. Skies remained storm-free for Curiosity in Gale Crater and InSight on Elysium Planitia each afternoon.

    Freaky to think that the Martian tropics have a cloudy season like our tropics do, even if the cause is completely different…