Finding out the ambiance with Perseverance may be difficult! Think about recognizing an fascinating cloud in a photograph taken yesterday; not like one thing fascinating on the floor, extra observations simply aren’t doable, because it’s lengthy passed by now. Or think about attempting to take a film of a mud satan zooming throughout Jezero crater, when the rover’s day by day actions are all deliberate out earlier than the rover even wakes up. The truth that many atmospheric phenomena are short-lived and/or exhausting to foretell, and infrequently solely happen throughout sure time durations, signifies that atmospheric scientists on the Mars 2020 crew should use totally different methods to look at them.
Firstly, the sensors that make up the first atmospheric instrument (the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, MEDA) make meteorological and associated observations repeatedly at the very least each different hour of each sol. This offers us an excellent likelihood of capturing transient and hard-to-predict phenomena.
Secondly, for sensors that may’t measure as usually – just like the cameras and microphone – we take measurements over a number of sols at totally different instances and (for imaging) instructions, to construct up statistics on when and the place fascinating phenomena happen.
Thirdly, once we anticipate to see one thing uncommon based mostly on the time of yr or location, we enhance the cadence of measurements to verify we seize that occasion. In Perseverance’s first yr on Mars we noticed a scattering halo towards the top of Mars’s cloudy season. This shiny ring across the Solar is attributable to giant hexagonal ice crystals that solely type when numerous water vapor is current. Regardless of dozens of makes an attempt to picture one other within the second Mars yr, it wasn’t till our final try – proper earlier than the cloudy season ended – that we noticed one (see determine)!
And at last, when a longer-lived uncommon occasion is underway, we react by including in additional measurements. There are at present numerous mud storms taking place on Mars, and with some passing proper over Jezero we’ve not too long ago measured the most important mud opacities of all the mission thus far! So we’ve been taking further observations to inform us about how the atmospheric state, dustiness, and native mud lifting have been altering on account of this storm exercise.
For a lot of of those observations, we don’t know if we’ll even ‘catch’ the atmospheric phenomena we’re attempting to review till we get the outcomes again on Earth. However even figuring out when, the place, and beneath what situations one thing doesn’t happen may be very helpful. And by persevering, we’ve been capable of acquire implausible observations of the whole lot from clouds and halos to mud devils and the onset of mud storms.
