We are about to learn a lot more about the Martian climate – BGR

• NASA wants to better understand the weather on Mars and its new Perseverance rover should help with that.
• Scientists are eager to learn about the role dust plays in the Martian climate and how massive dust storms can seemingly come out of nowhere.
• Perseverance should arrive on Mars within 100 days.

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I don’t know about you, but I want to know more about the weather on other planets. NASA’s first foray into otherworldly weather reports came in the wake of the InSight lander opening a store on the Red Planet. The space agency even created a website for regular updates and it was really interesting to see the weather change over the course of weeks and months.

Now, another piece of powerful NASA hardware will be taking weather readings and reporting back to Earth. This time it’s the Perseverance rover coming soon. As NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a new blog post, Perseverance has tools that will work to provide even more accurate weather reports from the surface of Mars than we’ve ever had before.

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Perseverance has many goals to address during his months on Mars. The rover is equipped with the ability to take and seal samples of the Martian surface in preparation for a possible study on Earth. That part of the mission will be done over a long period of time, but one of the things the rover can start doing sooner rather than later is detect time.

NASA’s JPL explains:

The instrument underlying the meteorological data is called MEDA, short for Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer. Part of its goal is to collect the basics: temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure and relative humidity. Temperature patterns at the Perseverance landing site range from an average of minus 126 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 88 degrees Celsius) at night to about minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon.

NASA says one of the most important things it wants to understand better about the Martian climate is the role that dust plays. The planet’s surface is largely dry and very dusty, and dust storms can dominate huge sections of the planet and sometimes even take over the entire world. Storms are intense, but why do they form? NASA wants to find out.

“Understanding Martian dust is very important for this mission,” Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Manfredi, who will work with meteorological instruments on Perseverance, said in a statement. “Those fine specks of dust rise from the surface and cover the entire planet. We don’t know how Martian winds and temperature changes are capable of causing those global dust storms, but this will be important information for future missions. “

The Perseverance rover has just crossed the 100-day limit and is reaching the last leg of its journey to Mars. The rover will land on Mars in February, and assuming everything goes according to plan, we should start seeing some of the first mission data shortly thereafter.