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Thursday, August 25, 2005

Semantically, there are no F5 tornadoes on Mars.


When Mark Lemmon takes pictures of twisters on Mars, he can't really impress his friends because it is unlikely that a dust devil on Mars will ever get to be called a tornado. See, a tornado is defined by the windspeed of its vortex and more importantly by the destruction it could do to habitation. Since no one lives on Mars and the framerate of the Mars Landers camera is low, it is unlikely that we will know the windspeed of these monster dust devils anytime soon.