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

Martian weather between 9 March 2015 and 15 March 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.

Local storm activity along the Acidalia storm track picked up in earnest this past week. One large local storm that developed in the Acidalia-Chryse-Kasei region, propagated southward along the Acidalia storm-track through Lunae Planum and Xanthe and crossed into the southern hemisphere on March 11 just north of Valles Marineris before abating. Other local storms were observed in Tempe, northwest of Arabia, and Amazonis. In the southern hemisphere, dust-lifting occurred in southern Cimmeria over the course of several sols, forming a modestly large storm with dust extending south into the high-latitudes near the south polar residual cap edge. Diffuse water ice clouds were present over Arsia Mons and in Tyrrhenna. Clouds related to the north polar hood formed a wave-2 structure dipping southward into Acidalia and Utopia. While dust-lifting activity began to pick up, storms and hazes remained a comfortable distance away from both rover sites, leaving relatively clear and storm-free skies over Meridiani and 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.