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[Brian Jackson, Assistant Professor, Physics Department]: Dust devils are able to lift dust even when they shouldn’t be able to. The same thing is true for dust devils on Mars, and so we’re out here on The Alvord Desert to probe active dust devils and try to understand one: how they lift dust so easily into the atmosphere for the earth and then from that try to understand how they lift dust so easily on Mars.

Although dust devils have been studied for centuries even going back to the ancient Greeks, people have been thinking about dust devils and trying to puzzle them out. We still don’t really understand how they work and the way we’re trying to probe these dust devils is to actually fly instrumented drones through the active dust devils so the drones have a variety of different instruments on them including pressure and temperature loggers.

We also try to collect dust from the active dust devils so we have these sticky pads that we’ve cut up and put on the drone and so as the drone flies through the dust devil, the hope is that it will actually pick up some of the dust while making measurements of the physical properties of the dust devil and so we’re hoping to piece together what the physical properties are of the dust devil and how much dust that allows the dust devil to lift.

This is the only study that I’m aware of actually using drones to probe dust devils. Folks have done field studies of dust devils for decades, but it’s only in the last several years that we’ve had instrumentation that’s actually small and robust enough that we can stick it on a small drone and fly it through a dust devil.

[Nick Ellett, Masters Student, Geology Department]: My sort of sub-discipline within geology is called geomorphology which is the study of earth’s surface processes and so wind process like dust devils definitely fit in that category and just overall geomorphologists are interested in studying how the earth’s surface changes due to geological processes such as erosion, etc.

So the sort of mechanism of how these dust devils are working out on the playa and the existence of the playa in the first place are some overlaps between Brian’s physics-based stuff and our geoscience.

[Brian Jackson]: Why are we driving three hours out to the middle of nowhere to come study dust devils? They’re just really fascinating phenomenon.

If you look at almost any picture of the surface of Mars, very often you’re going to see dust devils towering over the surface casting these enormous shadows so they play a huge role in the climate on Mar and so if we can understand them out here in the desert on the earth, it really helps us to understand how Mars works.

This is a good example of what’s called comparative planetology where we use our understanding of one planet to try to understand another planet where it’s a little more difficult to go out into the field say and study the dust devils directly.