It turns out that Mars can be a very windy place.
The Perseverance rover landed on the red planet in February 2021 carrying, among other instruments, a weather station called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among several other sensors that provide weather metrics such as humidity, radiation, and air temperature.
Pebbles carried by the strong gusts of the Red Planet recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still track the wind in its landing zone in the Jezero crater, albeit with reduced sensitivity, said José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA, to Space. how.
Related: 1 year later, the Ingenuity helicopter is still going strong on Mars
“Right now, the sensor is diminished in its capabilities, but it still provides magnitudes of speed and direction,” Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, wrote in an email. “The whole team is now re-adjusting the recovery procedure to get more accuracy from the damage-free detector readings.”
The two wind sensors about the size of a Perseverance ruler are surrounded by six individual detectors that aim to give accurate readings from any direction, according to materials (opens in a new tab) from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from NASA in California, which manages the rover.
Each of the two main wind sensors is connected to a boom that can be deployed to move the sensors away from the rover while driving, because the perseverance of the size of a car affects wind currents by their own movements through the fine atmosphere. Martian, JPL officials said. .
The Perseverance rover deploys one of its wind sensors to the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) during Earth practice activities in 2019. (Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
Like all Perseverance instruments, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. “But of course, there’s a limit to everything.”
And for an instrument like MEDA, the limit is more difficult, as the sensors must be exposed to environmental conditions to record wind parameters. But when stronger-than-expected winds lifted larger-than-expected pebbles, the combination caused damage to some of the detector elements.
“Neither the predictions nor the experience we had of previous missions predicted such strong winds, nor so much loose material of this nature,” Rodriguez Manfredi said. (He is also principal investigator of another temperature and wind sensor at NASA’s InSight spacecraft on the Red Planet since November 2018 and is expected to complete his mission this year).
He added that it was ironic that the sensors were damaged by the wind, or “precisely what we were looking for.”
Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021 and, along with a helicopter called Ingenuity, is exploring an ancient river delta that may have been rich in microbes billions of years ago.
In addition to measuring wind, weather, and rock composition, the rover is collecting the most promising material for caching for a future sample return mission with the goal of sending samples to Earth on 2030s.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook.