Live Dust Devil? |
Live Dust Devil? |
Mar 10 2005, 11:17 PM
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#1
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Rover Driver Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 2-May 04 From: Litchfield Park, Arizona (Phoenix area) Member No.: 71 |
Man, this looks an awful lot like a dust devil in the distance. What do you think?
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Mar 12 2005, 06:36 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
QUOTE (alan @ Mar 12 2005, 06:09 PM) The dust devils have been mentioned on msnbc.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3217961/ "The best way to see it is to flip between images for a "now you see it, now you don't" effect. Daniel Crotty has created just such an animated image, http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/collections/S..._420_navcam.gif and after watching the picture flip back and forth for a few seconds, you should be able to see the dust devil in the distance." "But at least so far, these devils are not fearsome: In fact, it appears that winds may be clearing off the dust-laden solar panels on Spirit as well as on Opportunity, on the other side of the planet. That is giving both rovers a welcome energy boost, Oberg reports, based on posts by experts on Mars-interest Internet forums." Um, yeah -- that's sort of my fault. I posted the news about Spirit getting a cleaning, and about the guys here spotting what appeared to be dust devils, to the Usenet newsgroups alt.sci.planetary and sci.space.history, where I also tend to hang out. Several hours later, I found an e-mail in my mailbox from Jim Oberg (who haunts sci.space.history, partially because it gives him a lot of good leads for his MSNBC news articles and columns), asking me for any details and official confirmations I might have about it. I did give Jim O. the URL to this forum, and told him that while we could see the effects of wind in a lot of images from Sol 421 (including degradation of rover tracks and the cleaning of rover surfaces), I really didn't have an official confirmation of Spirit's vastly improved power situation. Come to think of it, I think we've just heard that statement from Doug and Pando -- I'd be curious as to where they got it, and when it was discovered... *hint, hint*... ) I rather specifically didn't post the URL to this forum on Usenet -- not that this isn't a publically accessible forum, I just didn't want to spur a flood of Usenet crazies into this nice, pleasant forum... *smile*... If there's one thing we do NOT need here, it's a flood of people insisting that every single rock in the MER images is actually a fossil, living plant or animal, and/or evidence of a third gunman hiding on the grassy knoll... *sigh*... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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