MRO MARCI Weather Report for the week of
18 March 2019 – 24 March 2019

Martian weather between 18 March 2019 and 24 March 2019:

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.

Northern hemisphere spring arrived along with southern hemisphere autumn this past week on Mars. Southern Aonia experienced dusty conditions as repeated dust-lifting activity continued in the 60° south latitude band. Moving our attention towards the low-latitudes, a stronger presence of orographic water ice clouds was observed above the Tharsis Montes. Continuing north, a couple of frontal dust events were spotted pushing southwards over southern Acidalia during the first half of the week. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Tharsis bulge a brief local-scale dust storm occurred over northwest Amazonis. Each sol, storm-free skies remained for both the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater and the InSight lander on Elysium Planitia.

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 Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity (in Gale Crater) and the InSight lander (in Elysium Planitia). 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.