It's early in the week, but this is probably going to be the most
useless piece of information you'll come across in that period:
The following excerpt comes from one of the regular contributors of
space news to the amateur radio packet radio network. It quotes a
reasonably authoritative source:
Mars rover detects warm pockets in atmosphere
BY CHRIS KRIDLER
FLORIDA TODAY
Feb 12, 2004
CAPE CANAVERAL -- Mars weather watchers haven't seen towering dust
devils yet through the rovers' eyes, but they are measuring
intriguing spikes in temperature.
NASA's twin robotic rovers can look into the sky with an instrument
that's also designed to read the temperature of rocks.
"If you go out in the desert, you have warm blobs of air move past
you, and they're called thermals," Cornell's Don Banfield, who works
with the science team, said Thursday. "We see them on Earth all the
time."
Now, scientists are seeing them on Mars.
The mini-thermal emission spectrometer on Spirit, reading the
temperature about eight stories high one morning, saw bumps of seven
degrees Fahrenheit every minute or so. The findings could suggest
how wind mixes through the atmosphere, creating Mars' weather and
moving its dust.
So there you are; plenty of possible thermals await us when we finally
realise the quite strange and totally useless ambition of some people
to colonise the place.
Regards,
Terry
(in cynical mode - it's Monday after all) ;-)
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