Of Wind and Dust Devils on Mars

An annotated image of the surface of Mars, taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on May 30, 2014. The contrast has been enhanced in this image to better show the region where InSight landed on Nov. 26, 2018. The labels show the approximate position of NASA’s InSight lander in Elysium Planitia. Overlaid on top are the direction of the vibrations detected by InSight’s science instruments. The diagonal lines, faintly seen moving from upper left corner to the lower right corner of the image, show the paths of dust devils on the Martian surface. The vibrations recorded by InSight line up with the direction of the dust devil motion.

The original image is at https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_036761_1845

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), provided the SEIS instrument, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL.