MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
16 March 2015 – 22 March 2015

Martian weather between 16 March 2015 and 22 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.

Dust-lifting in the southern high latitudes of Cimmeria-Promethei developed into a large regional dust storm over the course of the week. The storm propagated eastward from Cimmeria into Sirenum obscuring the surface up to ~50°S latitude. By the end of the week, all southern longitudes from ~68°S latitude and southward were obscured by atmospheric dust to varying degrees. In the northern hemisphere, local storms were observed in Amazonis, northern Alba Patera, Chryse, Tempe, Deuteronilus, Acidalia, Utopia, and the Phlegra Montes. Water ice clouds persisted over Syria, Tyrrhena, and the Tharsis Montes each afternoon. Ground frost associated with the developing seasonal north polar cap edge was observed in areas not obscured by polar hood water ice clouds and dust storms. Despite all the storm activity in both hemispheres, skies over the two rover sites (Gale Crater and Meridiani) remained storm-free.

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.