Originally published at: Incredible video of mile-high dust devil on Mars | Boing Boing
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When sending a helicopter to mars (Ingenuity) was first purposed (c2015) there were all sorts of comment imbroglios over the issue of winds and dust-storms on mars. Occasionally referencing storm scenes from the concurrent film The Martian, of the sort “man… your helicopter will be torn to shreds in the first wind storm on Mars!” to be countered with "There’s hardly any atmosphere on Mars! There are no real wind storms there!" etc. And now we’ve got “mile-high dust devils”? What’s a gormless earther supposed to think? Meanwhile, Ingenuity-the-copter made another flight near the end of September [shrug]
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That’s nothing Elon couldn’t cope with…
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As God as my witness, I thought that a mile-high dust devil was a tornado.
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That’s super-cool!
The more we study Mars and the other planets, the more clear it becomes that they are worlds of their own. Intellectually, this is obvious, but stuff like this drives it home on an emotional level.
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There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audiance divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.
– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, 1999
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Look closer…
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video for the BBS (aaaand, with that bright spot on the surface, I’m going to have to go with Jewish Space Laser Engraver)
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