August of Wind: Rare Mars Dust Devil Footage Released

astrobio writes "Very rare picture released today from Mars Orbital Camera: the image actually captured a dust devil in the act of creating a streak as it climbed an embankment out of a crater. See panorama, larger image here, and in context. Apparently the University of Arizona has a study called Project Matador which is supposed to tornado-chase on Earth, so that Mars-instruments can be hardened against dust devils. Dorothy, it isn't Kansas."

Dust Devil

[ThereIsNoSporkNeo]

To be honest, my first thought was that a dust devil was some sort of critter.

Sounds like a Tabloid front-page
"DUST-DEVIL CLIMBS OUT OF MARTIAN CRATER, ONLY TO BE RESTRAINED BY ELVIS"

maned disasters?

[The Rogue86]

could tornado chases on mars become the wave of the future for rich thrill seekers much like the russian trips to space?

Re:maned disasters?

[Demon Phreak]

that would be pretty cool. getting thrashed by marsian tornadoes. hmm...

Re:maned disasters?

[Misanthropic Lycanth]

Martian trailer parks, beware...

Why use Flash for this?

[DLWormwood]

This was just a picture, not an animation. The width of the picture would have fit fine on a 1024 wide display, and 800 wide displays would the see the bulk of the image anyway...

Follow up:

[dacarr]

Orbital cameras around Mars have revealed the whirlwind to have been generated by the ever famous Tasmanian Devil, as it went on a continuous chase after celebrity rabbit Bugs Bunny, apparently as a secret agent deployed by Marvin the Martian.

Quoth Mr. Bunny on conditions on Mars, "Eh, no decent atmosphere, but somebody has to stop that crazy martian character."

Neither Mr. Devil nor Mr. Martian were available for comment.

Dust Devils

[Blind Linux]

NASA has pressure-time graphs of dust devils [nasa.gov] as well as their patterns on their website.
Interesting findings from the Mars Pathfinder are also shown and detailed there.

Primary link is to some strange format called swf

[Anonymous Coward]

The link is unreadable with standard web browsing
tools. I woul expect better from slashdot ....

problem with mime type on swf

[David Frankenstein]

Why does Slashdot serve the .swf file with mime type "application/x-shockware-flash" instead of "application/x-shockwave-flash" ? Is it a typo on the server?