Movie of Mars Dust Storm

Bamfarooni writes: "The hubble isn't the only spacecraft looking at Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor has been mapping the surface and atmosphere of Mars for the past 3 years, and has a cool movie of one of the largest Martian dust storms in recorded history."

Re:Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no reason that dust storms should pose a particular problem for colonists. The optical density of a dusty martian atmosphere is like a hazy day on earth.

While winds of 200kph sound awful, they really only pack the punch of a 10mph breeze on earth. (although a windmill on mars would probably look a bit different than its terran counterpart.)

Underground development is a good idea for other reasons, though. For heilding from cosmic rays and solar flares, a thick layer of regolith will come in handy.

Hellas to Tharsis

[boldra]

I found it interesting that the storm spread from the low-altitude (high air-pressure) region of Hellas to the high-altitude Tharsis. Surely if storms of this scale repeatedly follow this pattern Tharsis is only going to get /lower/? It was also interesting to see the way the storm spread around Olympus Mons; with something of a shadow of calm as the storm spread.

Animated GIF and errors

[boldra]

I can't imagine why they chose the animated GIF to distribute this image. It may have more platform independance that using mpegs, but other video formats have the advantages of being able to freeze and rewind.

Did anyone else notice the amount of error pixels that were apparent? Particularly the Jul 8th image [asu.edu] at 90W. Surely that's transmission noise? Could the weather pattern really be that fine?

Re:Animated GIF and errors

[Bamfarooni]

We use animated gif because it is universally supported and I have tools handy that produce it. I've never gotten around to tweaking mpeg_encode enough to make it produce anything that didn't look terrible.

Each frame is produced from 1 day's data, which consists of 12 orbits. So we get 12 little strips spread around the planet and have to fill in the gaps to make something that is viewable and easy to understand. This can of course lead to some visible artifacts.

The images from the 8th and 9th at 90W show some obvious interpolation artifacts (the diagonal lines), but there are probably some clear pockets in there too.

Speculation

[Sygiinu]

Wouldn't dust storms of this magnitude seriously hamper future Mars colonies? If such a storm were to set-in whilst our people were away from shelter then they would have to dig-in, but I doubt that they could survive for long enough.

Also, I suspect that surface buildings would be quite badly damaged (sandblasted windows anyone?) and our solar panels wouldn't last long either.

Perhaps colonising Mars under the surface is the way to go - that could resolve some of the problems due to the temperature as well.