Investigating dust devils on Mars through the Makadikadi Salt Pans analogue (Botswana)

In the framework of Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) Transnational Access (TA) programme, from 29 September to 6 October 2021 a field campaign was conducted at the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans (Botswana) [1] with the spare units of the radiometers RDS [3] (part of MEDA meteo station [2] onboard on the NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover) and SIS (originally selected for ExoMars 2022 METEO package).The main goal of the campaign was to characterize the impact of dust devils on the observations made by these sensors, and so to evaluate the capabilities of this instrumentation to constrain the dust lifting activity on Mars (RDS is currently operating on Mars). For each day of the campaign, RDS and SIS were set at two different locations with the following instrumentation: 1) Two cameras to record panoramic videos; 2) A Vaisala weather station to perform measurements of pressure, wind direction and intensity, temperature and relative humidity; 3) A ZEN radiometer to measure how much light was absorbed by the dust at different wavelengths.

In this work we will present the different results obtained during this campaign for which a large number of dust devils and dust lifting events produced by wind gusts were analysed. For each dust lifting, we recorded the dust devil distance, the size, duration and direction. This information along with the videos made by the cameras, helped us to establish the amount of dust lifted by the dust devil as well as their distances from the instruments. We will also discuss the implication of our results for establishing the RDS and SIS capabilities for dust lifting characterisation on Mars.