Thursday, September 04, 2008

Movie of Martian Clouds from Phoenix Lander

Clouds scoot across the Martian sky in a movie clip consisting of 10 frames taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.

This clip accelerates the motion. The camera took these 10 frames over a 10-minute period from 2:52 p.m. to 3:02 p.m. local solar time at the Phoenix site during Sol 94 (Aug. 29), the 94th Martian day since landing.

<- movie ->

2 comments:

Dave Tackett said...

I saw that. The clouds were a lot thicker than I always imagined.

Anonymous said...

Bingo! I was wondering why they looked funny. For some reason I had expected clouds, if any, would be thin wispy things, and here they are almost like alto-cumuli. It almost leads me to think that there is vastly more ice crystals in the atmosphere than expected.