While NASA’s Curiosity Rover is busy exploring Mount Sharp, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter captured a massive dust storm that kicked up Earth-like clouds that can be seen from space. What it observed was that the storms appeared to grow and disappear in repeated cycles over a period of days, and the spirals you see are between 1000 km (621 mi) and 2000 km (1243 mi) in length.
Image Credit : NASA/ESA
The images reveal a particular phenomenon on Mars. They show that the martian dust storms are made up of regularly spaced smaller cloud cells, arranged like grains or pebbles. The texture is also seen in clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.
The familiar textures are formed by convection, whereby hot air rises because it is less dense than the cooler air around it. The type of convection observed here is called closed-cell convection, when air rises in the center of small cloud pockets, or cells. The gaps of the sky around the cloud cells are the pathways for cooler air to sink below the hot rising air.
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