NASA shares footage of 16 metre wide 'dust devil' spinning on the martian surface

National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA), on September 13, shared footage which featured a ‘dust devil’ on planet Mars. Captured by ‘Curiosity’ rover, the brief clip showed the ‘dust devil’ spinning across the Martian landscape. Along with the video, the space agency wrote that the dust devil, which is a columnar vortex of wind, was spotted by the rover as it continued to operate in a region which is currently in its ‘windy season.'

Shared on Instagram, the video is an animation of the frames that show the spinning columnar of wind aka the dust devil. In the clip, the dust devil appears to be passing through “small hills just above Curiosity's present location on Mount Sharp, a peak within Gale Crater”. Describing the dust devil, NASA wrote that it was half a kilometre away from curiosity when shot on September 9 and is estimated to be 16 feet wide. “The dust plume disappears past the top of the frame, so an exact height can't be known, but it's estimated to be at least 164 feet (50 meters) tall," NASA added.

'Looks like West Texas' 

The animated clip has left the internet intrigued with the clip racking over 2,738,642 views in just a few hours. It also gave opportunity to curious netizens to flood their questions. A user asks, "Is there life on Mars?" while another wrote, "Doesn't this prove there's air on mars?". Yet another joked, "Looks like West Texas, only 42.9 million miles away" " So how old is the camera filming in black and white moon filter?" read another comment. 

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Separately, NASA shared a rare photo of the globular cluster NGC 1805, located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Taking to its official Instagram handle, NASA shared the mystic photo of the tight cluster of thousands of stars located near the satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. “In its center, thousands of stars are packed 100 to 1,000 times closer to one another than the nearest stars are to our Sun,” NASA explained in the caption of the post. “The striking difference in star colors is illustrated in the image, which combines different types of light: blue stars, shining brightest in near-ultraviolet light, and red stars, illuminated in red and near-infrared,” it added.