Mars is a dusty and windy place. Put those two factors together and you get some spectacular whirlwinds. NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a lucky sequence of images showing a dust devil out for a stroll in the Jezero Crater.

Most of our views of Mars come in the form of still photos. NASA’s active rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, beam back a steady stream of images. Spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snap views from above. It’s rarer to get a sense of motion on Mars, but that’s what Percy delivered with its dust devil sequence.

NASA released a GIF of the whirlwind on September 29. The video is made up of 21 frames taken four seconds apart by one of the rover’s navigation cameras. The Navcams help Perseverance survey the landscape and make decisions about where and how to drive. One of the mast-mounted cameras fortuitously captured the dust devil at the end of August.

NASA sped up the sequence in the GIF. The whirlwind was moving at a speed of about 12 mph along a landscape feature named Thorofare Ridge. It was 2.5 miles away from the rover. Researchers calculated the dust devil’s width at about 200 feet. That’s about as wide as a hockey rink is long.

The top of the dust devil is out of frame, but the whirlwind’s shadow provided some clues to its size, which NASA estimated at 1.2 miles high. That’s a relative baby compared to some dust devils. MRO once snapped a dust devil estimated at 12 miles high.

Dust devils are common on Mars, but it’s always special when one of humanity’s robotic emissaries captures one of them in action. It shows Mars isn’t a static place frozen in time. It’s an active world. Sometimes that activity causes problems for Mars missions. NASA’s Opportunity rover, a predecessor to the agency’s current rovers, famously met its demise when a massive dust storm in 2018 cloaked its solar panels. The Mars InSight lander, a stationary machine, went dark in 2022 after accumulated dust choked out its solar panels.

Perseverance and its older sibling Curiosity don’t rely on solar power. Instead, they use radioisotope power systems. It’s an improvement NASA made to protect the rovers from the whims of Martian dust.

Perseverance and its companion helicopter Ingenuity have been in residence on Mars since early 2021. The rover is exploring a dry crater with an intriguing history of water. Percy is a rolling laboratory designed to examine its surroundings and gather rock samples NASA hopes to bring back to Earth one day.

One of Perseverance’s main mission goals is to help scientists understand whether or not Mars once hosted life. We’re not talking dinosaurs or cockroaches, but rather microbes from the planet’s long ago, more watery past. So far, there’s no definitive evidence that life once existed on Mars. Scientists are eager to get Percy’s rock samples into labs on Earth for a more in-depth analysis than what the rover can do on site.

Dust devils sometimes reach the rover itself. Perseverance even captured audio of a dust devil that passed over it in late 2021. The rover’s experiences bring Mars closer to Earth. Our planets may be incredibly different, but they also have a lot in common, including dust-packed whirlwinds.