For those of us who read Ray Bradbury's works as kids and dreamed of Mars, but knew it was all "just science fiction", the images sent home by the Mars Phoenix Lander are especially poignant. In this September 18 composite, the faithful little Lander shows us clouds moving across the Martion sky: real science, not fiction.
How cool is that? Very.
This photo is actually a screen grab from a moving graphic sequence that combined 32 images of clouds moving eastward across a Martian horizon. The Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander took this set of images on Sept. 18, 2008, during early afternoon hours of the 113th Martian day of the mission.
The view is toward the north. The actual elapsed time between the first image and the last image is nearly half an hour. The numbers inset at lower left are the elapsed time, in seconds, after the first image of the sequence. The particles in the clouds are water-ice, as in cirrus clouds on Earth.
The image is from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.
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