Global storms on Mars shoot dust towers up into the air | CNN

This perspective of Mars' Valles Marineris hemisphere from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

This 2016 self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.

JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NASA

A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars, taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.

NASA

Although Mars isn't geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the Red Planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars' thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.

JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/NASA

The European Space Agency's Mars Express mission captured this 2018 image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.

ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

InSight's seismometer recorded a "marsquake" for the first time in April 2019.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the "Star Trek" symbol.

NASA

These small, mineral hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA's Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity's robotic arm, with color information added from the rover's panoramic camera. These minerals suggests that Mars had a watery past.

JPL-Caltech/Cornell/USGS/NASA

This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called Recurring Slope Lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. These 2001 images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet's appearance when haze raised by dust-storm activity in the south became globally distributed.

JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NASA

Curiosity took images in September 2015 of Mount Sharp, a hematite-rich ridge, a plain full of clay minerals to create a composite and rounded buttes high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.

JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NASA

From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this 2016 image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover's tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

HiRISE captured layered deposits and a bright ice cap at the Martian north pole.

JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/NASA

Mars is far from a flat, barren landscape. Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.

JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/NASA

NASA's Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama, including more than a thousand images and 1.8 billion pixels, of the Martian surface between November 24 and December 1, 2019.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles across, and the dark bands in are deep troughs. To the right of center, a large canyon, Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is about the length of the United States' famous Grand Canyon and up to 1.2 miles deep.

JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NASA

A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera in November 2013. The crater spans approximately 100 feet and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area.

JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/NASA

This dark mound, called Ireson Hill, is on the Murray formation on lower Mount Sharp, near a location where NASA's Curiosity rover examined a linear sand dune in February 2017.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Is that cookies and cream on Mars? No, it's just polar dunes dusted with ice and sand.

CaSSIS/ESA/Roscosmos

The cloud in the center of the image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.

MSSS/JPL-Caltech/NASA

HiRISE took this image of a kilometer-size crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars is heading into spring.

JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/NASA

The two largest quakes detected by NASA's InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.

JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/NASA

Taken by the Viking 1 lander shortly after it touched down on Mars, this image is the first photograph ever taken from the surface of Mars. It was taken on July 20, 1976.

NASA

The best photos of Mars

CNN —

Last year, a dust storm encircled Mars for months, ending NASA’s Opportunity mission when sunlight couldn’t reach the solar-powered rover.

But other NASA spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, were able to track valuable information about the storm that’s helping scientists understand the phenomenon.

The data sent back by the orbiters revealed dust towers within the 2018 storm. Dust towers occur when dust clouds react to the warmth of the sun and rise vertically. The gigantic clouds can climb incredibly high due to the thin atmosphere. They’re also very dense.

The towers are created when a large area of dust, which can be compared to the width of Rhode Island, lifts up into the air. The dust grows into a tower 50 miles high and spreads out to span the width of Nevada, according to NASA. When the tower falls apart, the dust layer – which remains 35 miles up from Mars’ surface – could span the entire United States in width.

The dust towers don’t require a global dust storm, which affects the whole planet, to form, but there are many more of them during the global storms – and the churning towers could last for weeks.

“Normally the dust would fall down in a day or so,” said Nicholas Heavens, one of the study authors at Hampton University. “But during a global storm, dust towers are renewed continuously for weeks.”

The phenomenon was discussed in two studies published in October and November.

It’s even possible that water vapor trapped in the dust could essentially catch a ride on the towers and pass through Mars’ thin atmosphere into space. There, the water would be broken apart by solar radiation, according to NASA. Researchers believe this is one possible explanation for the disappearance of water that could once be found on Mars billions of years ago.

Although Mars seems cold and inhospitable today, it was a different story three to four billion years ago. A 2019 study suggests that the Red Planet was once warm enough to host rainstorms and flowing water, which would have created an environment that could support simple life.

The knowledge of water on ancient Mars has been common for years, but its form was up for debate. Scientists were unsure whether the water was trapped in ice or it actually flowed over the surface. There was also uncertainty over the duration of flowing water if temperatures were warm enough to allow it.

A warm surface with flowing water supports the idea that life could have formed independently on the planet’s surface.

Water vapor appears on Mars today as thin, wispy clouds. So if heated dust is traveling upwards, it could carry gases and water vapor with it. Previous research has shown it’s possible for global dust storms on Mars to send water up into the air.

Dust storms are common on Mars, but planet-encircling storms are more rare. This is why it’s so difficult for scientists to understand them.

“Global dust storms are really unusual,” said David Kass, Mars Climate Sounder scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We really don’t have anything like this on the Earth, where the entire planet’s weather changes for several months.”