Martian Dust Devils Reveal Dynamic Surface Winds

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By Javier Barbuzano, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: In 2020, the...InSight lander...was performing spectacularly, and it had no end in sight. Then, its power began to fade. Fine Martian dust was relentlessly piling on top of its solar panels, blocking sunlight. Mission operators...hoped that occasional wind gusts or passing dust devils would sweep the panels clean... [as] had prolonged the lives of earlier robotic explorers, such as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. But for InSight, no such wind ever came, and its batteries slowly ran out of juice. ...Researchers still know little about how winds move across the planet’s surface and interact with dust. To help fill this gap, a group of researchers has now reviewed decades of orbital imagery from two European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft—Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, operational since 2004 and 2016, respectively—looking for dust devils and using them as a proxy for surface winds. ...these orbiters have captured thousands of high-resolution images of Mars’s surface. [with] countless sightings of dust devils, which drift with the prevailing winds. ...tracking the motion of these vortices provides a rare window into their direction and velocity. ...To automate the search, Bickel and colleagues trained a convolutional neural network—a type of artificial intelligence (AI) ...to identify the dust devils. After training the algorithm ...they let it loose on their full dataset of 50,000 orbital images. “Its only function is to identify dust levels in images; it can’t do anything else. It’s very stupid,” Bickel said. However, it needed only a few hours to scan the entire collection.... 

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