MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
6 March 2017 – 12 March 2017

Martian weather between 6 March 2017 and 12 March 2017:

The MARCI acquires a global view of the red planet and its weather patterns every day. Please click and play the movie (.mp4 file) to see how the weather on Mars changed during this time.

Regional storm activity continued over Xanthe Terra as last week’s regional storm parked itself over the equator, just west of the Opportunity rover site. The storm extended from Chryse Planitia in the north to northwest Noachis in the southern hemisphere, covering an area about the size of the continental United States. Further south, remnants of the previous month’s major dust storm were observed as diffuse hazes at southern mid-latitudes. Looking to the northern hemisphere, polar hood clouds continued to dissipate revealing the bright CO2 ground-ice of the seasonal north polar ice cap, whose southern edge extended to ~ 54°N latitude. A few local-scale dust storms were observed just south of the cap edge, over Deuteronilus and Amazonis. Low-latitude water-ice clouds continued to be at a minimum due to warmer conditions. The Curiosity rover in Gale Crater experienced storm-free but dusty skies while Opportunity felt the impact of the nearby regional storm throughout the week.

This week’s MARCI “movie” can be downloaded HERE (9.0 MB .mp4 file).

This week’s MARCI “movie” can be downloaded HERE (9.0 MB .mov file).

Earlier Mars Weather Reports are available HERE.

About the Movie:
The movie (a .mp4 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 movie.

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