Unlike the constellation of meteorological satellites that surround planet Earth to capture every storm and provide data for future forecasts, no spacecraft fly around Mars solely to measure weather conditions on the red planet. Just one of the six spacecraft in orbit around Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, contains a color imager to track daily and seasonal variations in the Martian climate.
But static, daily images cannot adequately capture the dynamic and often ephemeral nature of Martian weather systems. And some of this weather is remarkably Earth-like, with cold fronts, cumulus clouds and linear features known on Earth as cloud streets among the features that occur in the thin Martian atmosphere.
So geologist and amateur astronomer Justin Cowart decided to see if he could fiddle with images captured by the High Resolution Stereo Colour Imager (HRSC) instrument onboard on the Eurpean Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, which produces stereographic color maps of Mars. In a blog post at The Planetary Society, Cowart explained how he transformed this data into short movies of Martian weather: