MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
6 October 2014 – 12 October 2014

Martian weather between 6 October 2014 and 12 October 2014:

The MARCI acquires a global view of the red planet and its weather patterns every day. Please click and play the Quicktime movie (.mov file) to see how the weather on Mars changed during this time.

Storm activity continued in earnest this week, with regional scale storms in the northern hemisphere and smaller local storms in the southern hemisphere. In the north, storm activity along the Acidalia storm track picked up, with storms travelling north to south into Chryse and leaving residual dust haze in parts of eastern Vallis Marineris. Local storms occurred frequently in Amazonis. Sporadic storms were also observed in Tempe, Elysium, and in western Isidis. In the south, local storms related to the the retreat of the seasonal south polar cap edge were observed at most longitudes, including in Sirenum, Noachis, and Cimmeria. Dust lifting also occurred in Hellas this week. Diffuse water ice clouds were observed intermittently over the Tharsis volcanoes, as well as over Syria, Arabia, and Tyrrhena. Despite the dust-lifting activity occurring elsewhere on the planet, the Opportunity rover in Meridiani was encountering elevated levels of atmospheric dust, while Curiosity in Gale Crater remained relatively isolated from the storms.

This week’s MARCI “movie” can be downloaded HERE (9.1 MB .mov file).

Earlier Mars Weather Reports are available HERE.

About the Quicktime Movie:
The movie (a .mov file that you can click and play, above) was generated from images obtained by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). During a nominal operational week, a total of about 273 MARCI images, taken in three of the camera’s seven color filter bands (420, 550, and 600 nanometer wavelengths), are map projected and mosaiced together to produce seven false-color daily global maps. These maps are then projected onto a sphere with north at the top and east to the right and with the mid-afternoon vantage point of an observer in the orbital plane (the imaginary plane that the planet draws out as it circles the Sun). Black areas in the movie are the result of data drops or high angle roll maneuvers by the spacecraft that limit the camera’s view of the planet. Equally-spaced blurry areas that run from south-to-north (bottom-to-top) result from the high off-nadir viewing geometry, a product of the spacecraft’s low-orbit, 250 km x 316 km (155 miles x 196 miles). The movie is rendered at a lower resolution than the intrinsic 1–2 km nadir resolution that the MARCI provides, so that it is practical to view and share via the Internet. The small white circles on these images of Mars indicate the locations of the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity (on Meridiani Planum), and the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity (in Gale Crater). Other locations on Mars referenced in the weather report can be found by referring to the map below. Note that the still image of Mars depicted at the top of this page is a single frame from the Quicktime movie.

Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., San Diego, California, U.S.A.