Mars is a devil eat devil world. The Perseverance rover recently witnessed a gruesome scene on the Red Planet, in which a dust devil consumed its smaller counterpart, morphing into one, slightly larger, swirling column of air and dust.
NASA’s six-wheeled robot was carrying out an imaging experiment to better understand the Martian atmosphere when it captured the two dust devils at play. Using its navigation camera, the Perseverance rover snapped images of several dust devils spinning erratically on the western rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater, in an area called Witch Hazel Hill.
The images were stitched into a short video that reveals the larger dust devil, which was approximately 210 feet (65 meters) wide, and a smaller dust devil, roughly 16 feet (5 meters) wide, trailing behind. Two more dust devils can be seen swirling in the background.
The tiny, unassuming twister walked straight into its own demise, and was swallowed up by its larger counterpart. “Convective vortices—aka dust devils—can be rather fiendish,” Mark Lemmon, a Perseverance scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “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.”
Dust devils were first spotted by NASA’s Viking mission in the 1970s, which photographed the cheeky phenomenon from Mars’ orbit. Two decades later, the Pathfinder mission captured the first image of a dust devil from the surface of Mars, with one even passing over the lander. Since then, NASA’s Martian rovers have captured their fair share of dust devils.
Unlike Earth, Mars’ atmosphere is too thin to support tornadoes. Instead, as air near the planet’s surface heats up and rises to meet the cooler, denser air, it begins to rotate. As more air joins the column, it picks up speed, as well as dust, and creates a swirling dust devil.
“If you feel bad for the little devil in our latest video, it may give you some solace to know the larger perpetrator most likely met its own end a few minutes later,” Lemmon said. “Dust devils on Mars only last about 10 minutes.”
