Wind, Dust, Mars, and Microbes

[Karen Brattain]

Mars is just fantastic. Its landscapes are so familiar and yet so alien and forbidding. Anyway, this short NASA article on martian winds caught my eye. For the upcoming February Astrobiology, I edited a paper about bacteria that grow on Earth deserts. As they grow, they form a crust on the sand which prevents fine particles from blowing around in the wind. Could these bacteria be useful… when we terraform Mars? Seriously! Someone has to start thinking about these things.

If we do colonize Mars, we will certainly need to do something to keep martian dust under control. Imagine: martian dust devils rise up to 9 kilometers above the planet’s surface. No, I’d rather not go out in that weather.

But as long as we are just observers on Earth, we can learn much about the martian atmosphere and surface from studying the patterns of dust particles deposited by the planet’s winds. This brings me back to the NASA article. I hope you enjoy it. You might also visit the University of Arizona HiRise website.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_006477_1745

"Orbiting Camera Details Dramatic Wind Action on Mars" (article mentioned above)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20080123.html