NASA published this story originally on April 3, 2025. Edits by EarthSky.
Mars dust devil eats its friend
The six-wheeled explorer Perseverance has been exploring the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars since late 2024. And recently it captured several red planet mini-twisters spinning on the rim.
A Martian dust devil can be seen consuming a smaller one in the animation above. It’s made of images taken by a navigation camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. These swirling, sometimes towering columns of air and dust are common on Mars. The smaller dust devil’s demise was captured during an imaging experiment conducted by Perseverance’s science team to better understand the forces at play in the Martian atmosphere.
When the rover snapped these images from about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) away, the larger dust devil was approximately 210 feet (65 meters) wide, while the smaller, trailing dust devil was roughly 16 feet (5 meters) wide. Perseverance recorded the scene January 25 as it explored the western rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater at a location called Witch Hazel Hill.
Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, explained:
Convective vortices – aka dust devils – can be rather fiendish. These mini-twisters wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering the visibility in their immediate area. If two dust devils happen upon each other, they can either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker.
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured new images of multiple dust devils while exploring the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars beginning in late 2024. The largest dust devil it saw was approximately 210 feet wide (65 meters). In the player above, atmospheric scientist Priya Patel explains what dust devils can teach us about weather conditions on the red planet.
Science of a Mars dust devil
Dust devils on either Earth or Mars are formed by rising and rotating columns of warm air. Air near the planet’s surface becomes heated by contact with the warmer ground and rises through the denser, cooler air above. As other air moves along the surface to take the place of the rising warmer air, it begins to rotate. When the incoming air rises into the column, it picks up speed like a spinning ice skater bringing their arms closer to their body. The air rushing in also picks up dust, and a dust devil is born.
Katie Stack Morgan, project scientist for the Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said:
Dust devils play a significant role in Martian weather patterns. Dust devil study is important because these phenomena indicate atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing wind directions and speed, and are responsible for about half the dust in the Martian atmosphere.
Mars dust devil images over time
Since landing in 2021, Perseverance has imaged whirlwinds on many occasions, including one on September 27, 2021, where a swarm of dust devils danced across the floor of Jezero Crater and the rover used its SuperCam microphone to record the first sounds of a Martian dust devil.
NASA’s Viking orbiters, in the 1970s, were the first spacecraft to photograph Martian dust devils. Two decades later, the agency’s Pathfinder mission was the first to image one from the surface and even detected a dust devil passing over the lander. Twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity managed to capture their fair share of dusty whirlwinds. Curiosity, which is exploring a location called Mount Sharp in Gale Crater on the opposite side of the red planet as Perseverance, sees them as well.
Bottom line: The Perseverance rover on Mars has been exploring the rim of Jezero Crater. And recently it captured several dust devils spinning on the rim.
Via NASA