MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
9 February 2015 – 15 February 2015

Martian weather between 9 February 2015 and 15 February 2015:

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.

Weather activity continued to pick up for the past week on Mars. At the start of last week, local dust storms were observed in Amazonis and northern Alba Patera. A very small dust lifting event was observed in Chryse the following sol. In the second half of the week, a rather long arcuate shaped local dust storm was observed over the plains of Utopia, extending southward into Elysium. During the same sol, more dust lifting events were observed over Amazonis and north of Alba Patera. In the subsequent sol, local dust storms were observed in Tempe-Acidalia and Cimmeria. Afternoon water-ice clouds were spotted over Syria and the Tharis Montes throughout the week. The north polar hood was starting to reveal frosted crater rims where the skies were relatively optically transparent. Minus the dust storm in Cimmeria, the southern hemisphere was quite calm for the entire week. Conditions were storm-free each afternoon over both the Opportunity rover on Meridiani Planum and the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater.

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.