NASA's Perseverance rover has captured rare footage of a towering twister, or"dust devil," dancing across the surface of Mars. The dusty vortex is taller than the average-size U.S. tornado and five times taller than the Empire State Building, according to NASA.
"We don’t see the top of the dust devil, but the shadow it throws gives us a good indication of its height," Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and a member of the Perseverance science team, said in a statement."Most are vertical columns. If this dust devil were configured that way, its shadow would indicate it is about 1.2 miles [2 km] in height.
Related: NASA's Perseverance rover loses its hitchhiking 'pet rock' after more than a year together on Mars