Thar She Blows!

October 18, 2008

Warning: Serious geek alert

It takes a special kind of person to get worked up about what you’ll see if you click on this link.

But you have to realize that that’s not just any doodad blowing in the wind. That’s part of the Phoenix science station and the wind is blowing on MARS.

I know this isn’t going to solve the financial crisis or help determine who should be the next president, but it’s pretty cool, IMHO, that humans can sit around in their homes and offices on planet Earth and see a picture of Mother Nature doing her thing on another world.

A bit of background: Last week, Phoenix, which is parked near the north pole of Mars, encountered its first dust storm. The pictures were taken with the probe’s Surface Stereo Imager. The bit flapping in the breeze is part of the Canadian Space Agency’s meteorological package.

Thanks to a sister spacecraft in orbit, scientists were able to get a bird’s-eye-view of the storm, which spanned nearly 14,300 square miles. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbit took this shot as the storm blew over the Phoenix landing site.

Comments

[matt]

Hopefully one day soon, man himself will know that wind.