MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
8 December 2014 – 14 December 2014

Martian weather between 8 December 2014 and 14 December 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.

Over the past week on Mars, small transient dust storms continued to develop along the seasonal south polar ice cap, generating an extensive, but diffuse dust cloud along the cap edge. Each afternoon, water-ice clouds were observed over the slopes of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano of the Tharsis Montes. A local scale dust event was observed advancing southward across Utopia in the middle of the week. During the sols that followed, a dust storm traveled southward from Chryse along the Acidalia storm track, across the equator and made its way into the highlands of Noachis. It is unusual to see a cross-equatorial storm occur so late in the northern-autumn/southern spring season. The last time an event similar to this occurred was back in 2007, and it was the precursor to a planet-encircling dust event (PEDE). However, following the extensive regional storm activity in the southern mid-latitudes this past October and November, it is unlikely that the storm will develop into a planet-encircling dust event. The north polar hood continued to be prominent at mid-to-high northern latitudes, with water-ice and dust clouds dipping southward over the plains of Acidalia and Utopia. The Curiosity rover in Gale Crater and the Opportunity rover on Meridiani Planum operated in storm-free conditions.

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.