Science is beginning to understand the origin of a curious cloud 1,800 km long Mars It appears daily for several warmer months on one of the largest volcanoes on the red planet.
Until now, it was difficult to observe this cloud originally photographed by a Russian spacecraft in the 1970s and located in 2018 by the European spacecraft. Mars Express, explained the European Space Agency (THIS).
But a scientific team used “a secret tool of Mars Express of Mars“was called a surveillance camera “VMC”, Jorge Hernández Bernal, from the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao (Spain), explained in a statement THIS.
All thanks to a webcam
With a resolution equivalent to that of a simple one webcam, this room was used for a short time in 2003, shortly after its launch Mars Express. Later, it was used sporadically for educational operations.
But unlike the much more sophisticated scientific instruments of the probe, the camera VMC has “a large field of view (…) and is well adapted to monitor the evolution of the phenomenon” of the cloud, according to Bernal, who confirms a study on this topic in Journal of Geophysical Research.
The observation showed that during spring and summer in the southern Martian hemisphere, the cloud Mars forms each sunrise on the side of the volcano Arsia Mons.
Composed of water vapor and ice crystals, the cloud rises with the first rays at about 40 km altitude, well above the 17 km of the ancient volcano. The winds stretch it to the west at a speed of 600 km / h, until it reaches a length of 1,800 km.
The phenomenon does not exceed two and a half hours before dispersal.
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