NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been roaming the surface of our closest planetary neighbor for over four years now.

During this time, it has captured plenty of data and images of scientific interest. With a main aim of understanding Mars’s unique geology and environment, the rover is collecting samples of Martian rock ahead of human missions to the red planet, as well as looking to detect any signs of past life.

But its incredible capabilities mean that sometimes it also inadvertently captures evidence of the extraordinary.

And the footage that Perseverance captured while near to the Jezero Crater recently certainly falls into that category.

Back in January, Perseverance was exploring an area known as Witch Hazel Hill, on the west side of the Jezero Crater.

In the images sent back to Earth, the rover spotted not one but four dust devils in one shot. And remarkably, one of the larger dust devils was actually consuming a smaller one.

Dust devils are a kind vortex caused by a planet’s surface heating the air. Heat rises, so as the warm air lifts, cooler air is pushed down, causing a swirling effect that picks up dust in the rapidly increasing rotation.

And in Mars’s environment, large and fast dust devils have long been identified, with the first captured by NASA’s Viking orbiters in the 1970s.

What makes these dust devils, recently captured by Perseverance, special is the way in which they behaved on camera. It was a special capture, as while dust devils are common on Mars, their behavior is unpredictable, making them difficult to photograph.

As Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, explained in a statement, the two focal dust devils (measuring approximately 65 meters and 5 meters in width) exhibited fascinating, but characteristic dust devil behavior:

“Convective vortices — aka dust devils — can be rather fiendish. These mini-twisters wander the surface of Mars, picking up dust as they go and lowering the visibility in their immediate area. If two dust devils happen upon each other, they can either obliterate one another or merge, with the stronger one consuming the weaker.”

 

Beyond being fascinating to observe, the footage of these dust devils offers researchers crucial information when it comes to understanding what life would be like for the first people to visit the red planet.

They tell us a lot more about how Mars’s weather systems differ from our own too, as Katie Stack Morgan -project scientist for the Perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California – continued:

“Dust devils play a significant role in Martian weather patterns. Dust devil study is important because these phenomena indicate atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing wind directions and speed, and are responsible for about half the dust in the Martian atmosphere.”

Though dust devils aren’t uncommon back home on Earth, especially in desert areas, Mars’s desert surface means that they are everywhere.

Future Martian settlers beware: though rare, dust devils can be dangerous since their wind speeds can reach up to 60mph, causing destruction in their paths.

But as the footage suggests, those with the most to fear from dust devils are other, smaller dust devils.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.