The Perseverance rover has continued to make a wonderful presentation of the Red Planet since it reached Mars last year. This is no easy task, however, and the Martian winds seem to have found it convenient to throw pebbles into one of the probe’s instruments to measure the Martian wind.
Among the many impressive scientific instruments Perseverance carries with it to study conditions on Mars is a weather station known as the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This tool measures both wind speeds and direction, along with many different data (humidity, air temperatures, and radiation).
However, pebbles carried by some strong winds recently struck and damaged one of the wind sensors, Space.com reported. Fortunately, MEDA is able to continue wind measurements with only slightly reduced precision.
“Currently, the sensor’s capabilities are reduced, but it still provides magnitudes of velocity and direction. The whole team is now looking to achieve greater accuracy from undamaged detector readings,” said Rodriguez Manfredi, scientist at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology, who runs MEDA, in a conversation with Space.com’s Elizabeth Howell. “It is re-adjusting the receiving procedure for it,” he said.
While the team expected encounters with wind and dust whirlwinds, both of which have been previously documented on Mars, they did not expect the level of activity Perseverance experienced in Jezero Crater.
José Antonio Rodríguez Manfredi, Principal Investigator of the MEDA instrument, commented on a paper the team recently published in Science Advances, saying, “We didn’t expect this much dust and wind activity. Neither the models nor our experience elsewhere on Mars (where Curiosity or InSight is) He gave us predictions with so many events and densities.”
According to this article, the rover passed about four eddies a day and may have encountered more than one per hour during a peak period of one hour just in the afternoon. Perseverance’s cameras revealed at least three times as many gusts of wind catching dust clouds called “dust lift events”. The largest of these formed a massive cloud covering about 4 square kilometers.
Martian winds can be very strongStorms can be quite strong on Mars. Some measurements show they can reach speeds of up to 100 kilometers per hour by picking up sand, dust and small rocks. Despite Mars’ incredibly thin atmosphere, it feels like a gentle breeze to humans, NASA says.
To take wind measurements, the MEDA instrument needs to be exposed to natural phenomena, but this time a stronger-than-expected wind blasted larger-than-expected pebbles. Rodriguez Manfredi told Space.com that it’s ironic that the sensors were “damaged because of exactly what we were looking for.”
Fortunately, MEDA is still working, and Perseverance is no stranger to Martian pebbles. He’s even had one of these pebbles on one of his wheels since February.
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