OnePlus is ready to sell its new flagship smartphone in the US weeks after it made the device official. Having now finally gotten Federal Communications Commission clearance, the OnePlus 15 is available for preorder. It’s currently only live on the OnePlus storefront, but the device will eventually come to Amazon and Best Buy as well.

The OnePlus 15 launched in China earlier this year, and it was supposed to go on sale in the US a month ago. However, the longest US government shutdown on record got in the way. Most of the FCC’s functions were suspended during the weekslong funding lapse, which prevented the agency from certifying new wireless products. Without that approval, OnePlus could not begin selling the phone. Thus, it had no firm release date when the phone was officially unveiled for the US in early November.

Interested parties can head to the OnePlus website to place an order. The base model starts at $900 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This version is only available in black. If you want the Ultraviolet or Sand Storm (with the distinctive micro-arc oxidation finish), you’ll have to upgrade to the $1,000 version, which has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

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Almost every technological innovation of the past several years has been laser-focused on one thing: generative AI. Many of these supposedly revolutionary systems run on big, expensive servers in a data center somewhere, but at the same time, chipmakers are crowing about the power of the neural processing units (NPU) they have brought to consumer devices. Every few months, it’s the same thing: This new NPU is 30 or 40 percent faster than the last one. That’s supposed to let you do something important, but no one really gets around to explaining what that is.

Experts envision a future of secure, personal AI tools with on-device intelligence, but does that match the reality of the AI boom? AI on the “edge” sounds great, but almost every AI tool of consequence is running in the cloud. So what’s that chip in your phone even doing?

What is an NPU?

Companies launching a new product often get bogged down in superlatives and vague marketing speak, so they do a poor job of explaining technical details. It’s not clear to most people buying a phone why they need the hardware to run AI workloads, and the supposed benefits are largely theoretical.

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Google is following through on its pledge to split Android versions into more frequent updates. We already had one Android 16 release this year, and now it’s time for the second. The new version is rolling out first on Google’s Pixel phones, featuring more icon customization, easier parental controls, and AI-powered notifications. Don’t be bummed if you aren’t first in line for the new Android 16—Google also has a raft of general improvements coming to the wider Android ecosystem.

Android 16, part 2

Since rolling out the first version of Android in 2008, Google has largely stuck to one major release per year. Android 16 changes things, moving from one monolithic release to two. Today’s OS update is the second part of the Android 16 era, but don’t expect major changes. As expected, the first release in June made more changes. Most of what we’ll see in the second update is geared toward Google’s Pixel phones, plus some less notable changes for developers.

Google’s new AI features for notifications are probably the most important change. Android 16 will use AI for two notification tasks: summarizing and organizing. The OS will take long chat conversations and summarize the notifications with AI. Notification data is processed locally on the device and won’t be uploaded anywhere. In the notification shade, the collapsed notification line will feature a summary of the conversation rather than a snippet of one message. Expanding the notification will display the full text.

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Samsung has a new foldable smartphone, and it’s not just another Z Flip or Z Fold. The Galaxy Z TriFold has three articulating sections that house a massive 10-inch tablet-style screen, along with a traditional smartphone screen on the outside. The lavish new smartphone is launching this month in South Korea with a hefty price tag, and it will eventually make its way to the US in early 2026.

Samsung says it refined its Armor FlexHinge design for the TriFold. The device’s two hinges are slightly different sizes because the phone’s three panels have distinct shapes. The center panel is the thickest at 4.2 mm, and the other two are fractions of a millimeter thinner. The phone has apparently been designed to account for the varying sizes and weights, allowing the frame to fold up tight in a pocketable form factor.

Huawei’s impressive Mate XT tri-fold phones have been making the rounds online, but they’re not available in Western markets. Samsung’s new foldable looks similar at a glance, but the way the three panels fit together is different. The Mate XT folds in a Z-shaped configuration, using part of the main screen as the cover display. On Samsung’s phone, the left and right segments fold inward behind the separate cover screen. Samsung claims it has tested the design extensively to verify that the hinges will hold up to daily use for years.

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Have you been trying to cast Stranger Things from your phone, only to find that your TV isn’t cooperating? It’s not the TV—Netflix is to blame for this one, and it’s intentional. The streaming app has recently updated its support for Google Cast to disable the feature in most situations. You’ll need to pay for one of the company’s more expensive plans, and even then, Netflix will only cast to older TVs and streaming dongles.

The Google Cast system began appearing in apps shortly after the original Chromecast launched in 2013. Since then, Netflix users have been able to start video streams on TVs and streaming boxes from the mobile app. That was vital for streaming targets without their own remote or on-screen interface, but times change.

Today, Google has moved beyond the remote-free Chromecast experience, and most TVs have their own standalone Netflix apps. Netflix itself is also allergic to anything that would allow people to share passwords or watch in a new place. Over the last couple of weeks, Netflix updated its app to remove most casting options, mirroring a change in 2019 to kill Apple AirPlay.

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Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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Google’s meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It’s available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly.

Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro—it’s actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the “Create images” option.

Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs.

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OnePlus got its start courting the enthusiast community by offering blazing-fast phones for a low price. While the prices aren’t quite as low as they once were, the new OnePlus 15 still delivers on value. Priced at $899, this phone sports the latest and most powerful Snapdragon processor, the largest battery in a mainstream smartphone, and a super-fast screen.

The OnePlus 15 still doesn’t deliver the most satisfying software experience, and the camera may actually be a step back for the company, but the things OnePlus gets right are very right. It’s a fast, sleek phone that runs for ages on a charge, and it’s a little cheaper than the competition. But its shortcomings make it hard to recommend this device over the latest from Google or Samsung—or even the flagship phone OnePlus released 10 months ago.

US buyers have time to mull it over, though. Because of the recent government shutdown, Federal Communications Commission approval of the OnePlus 15 has been delayed. The company says it will release the phone as soon as it can, but there’s no exact date yet.

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Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes.

Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says Gemini 3 sets a new high-water mark for vibe coding, and Google is announcing a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Antigravity, which is also available today.

The first member of the Gemini 3 family

Google says the release of Gemini 3 is yet another step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The new version of Google’s flagship AI model has expanded simulated reasoning abilities and shows improved understanding of text, images, and video. So far, testers like it—Google’s latest LLM is once again atop the LMArena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1,501, besting Gemini 2.5 Pro by 50 points.

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Google recently decided that the freedom afforded by Android was a bit too much and announced developer verification, a system that will require developers outside the Google Play platform to register with Google. Users and developers didn’t accept Google’s rationale and have been complaining loudly. As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that “experienced users” should have an escape hatch.

According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns are getting more aggressive, and there’s real harm being done in spite of the platform’s sideloading scare screens. Google says it’s common for scammers to use social engineering to create a false sense of urgency, prompting users to bypass Android’s built-in protections to install malicious apps.

Google’s solution to this problem, as announced several months ago, is to force everyone making apps to verify their identities. Unverified apps won’t install on any Google-certified device once verification rolls out. Without this, the company claims malware creators can endlessly create new apps to scam people. However, the centralized nature of verification threatened to introduce numerous headaches into a process that used to be straightforward for power users.

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In recent months, Google has promised to inject generative AI into the online shopping experience, and now it’s following through. The previously announced shopping features of AI Mode search are rolling out, and Gemini will also worm its way into Google’s forgotten Duplex automated phone call tech. It’s all coming in time for the holidays to allegedly make your gifting more convenient and also conveniently ensure that Google gets a piece of the action.

At Google I/O in May, the company announced its intention to bring conversational shopping to AI Mode. According to Google, its enormous “Shopping Graph” or retailer data means its AI is uniquely positioned to deliver useful suggestions. In the coming weeks, users in the US will be able to ask AI Mode complex questions about what to buy, and it will deliver suggestions, guides, tables, and other generated content to help you decide. And since this is gen AI, it comes with the usual disclaimers about possible mistakes.

You’re probably wondering where you’ll see sponsored shopping content in these experiences. Google says some of the content that appears in AI Mode will be ads, just like if you look up shopping results in a traditional search. Shopping features are also coming to the Gemini app, but Google says it won’t have sponsored content in the results for the time being.

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Until now, the aerospace outfit Blue Origin was little more than a plaything for Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. The company’s New Shepard rocket has launched a few space tourists, but its upcoming New Glenn vehicle will have a shot at something more important. NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract to launch a Mars mission next year, marking the firm’s first interplanetary launch.

NASA has chosen Blue Origin to handle launch services for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which is part of the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program. Blue Origin is one of 13 companies to get contracts under the program, designed to tolerate higher risk to allow for more innovation and lower overall costs.

Blue Origin has been developing New Glenn since 2012, announcing the vehicle in 2016, but it has yet to fly. When complete, New Glenn will be 322 feet (92 meters) tall with a diameter of 23 feet (9 meters). That’s larger in both dimensions than the Falcon 9 (70 x 3.7 meters). Like New Shepard, this rocket is designed to have a reusable first stage to reduce launch costs. It’s powered by seven BE-4 engines, a more powerful version of the oxygen and methane-fueled BE-3 used on New Shepard.

A render of what New Glenn may look like when finished.

The timeline is going to be tight — Blue Origin initially expected the first New Glenn launch to happen in 2020, but it has pushed it back several times. Currently, the rocket is slated to fly no earlier than Q4 of this year. NASA plans to launch the ESCAPADE about a year later, at the end of 2024. It’ll be up to Blue Origin to make sure its rocket is ready to go — projects in the VADR program call for less NASA oversight in order to save money.

Assuming Blue Origin comes through on its first interplanetary NASA contract, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will separate from the launch vehicle and spend 11 months coasting toward the red planet. Once there, the spacecraft will split into two identical orbiters, working together to analyze the planet’s magnetosphere. The mission will improve our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ weak magnetic field. That’s important information to have if we ever intend to send humans to Mars, for either a quick jaunt or long-term colonization. Although, either one is probably a long way off.

Now read:

• Blue Origin’s ‘Orbital Reef’ Space Station Gets Green Light from NASA
• NASA Will Award Second Lunar Lander Contract to Compete with SpaceX
• NASA and Blue Origin Will Simulate Lunar Gravity With Spinning Rockets

Phone batteries may have peaked. We’ve been hovering around the 5,000mAh mark in Android phones for years, and there’s no magical technology on the horizon to increase that. High charging speeds are almost as good, and that’s increasing by leaps and bounds with devices like the new OnePlus 11. The latest device from Chinese smartphone maker Realme leaves everyone else in the dust. The new Realme GT Neo 5 supports incredible 240W fast charging, making it the fastest-charging phone in the world.

The GT Neo 5 has a 4,600mAh battery, which the company claims can go from zero to 100 in just nine and a half minutes. If you don’t even have that long, a moment on the charger will ensure your phone has all the juice it needs before you head out the door. GSMArena reports it can charge to 80% in just 80 seconds and 50% in four minutes. You could plug in your totally dead phone while you put on your shoes and have enough charge to last the better part of a day.

Realme is a subsidiary of BBK Electronics, the Chinese megacorportation that also owns Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus. Oppo showed off a 240W charger in 2022, and we assume this device uses the same technology. Realme says the 240W charger takes advantage of the latest USB power specification, which was updated in 2021 to add support for charging at 240W. It has yet to appear in any Oppo or OnePlus phone, but that might be on the way.

The Realme GT Neo 5 has only been announced for China, and it’s unlikely it will make it to many international markets. Realme doesn’t operate in the US at all, and even if it did release the GT Neo 5, it wouldn’t charge as fast. China uses 220v electricity, but many other markets, like the US, have 110v. That makes it harder to reach extremely high charging wattages. For example, the OnePlus 11 charges at 80W stateside but 100W in China.

Aside from the charging, there’s not much that sets the GT Neo 5 apart from other high-end Chinese Android phones. It has last year’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, a 6.74-inch 1240p OLED with 144Hz refresh, and an underwhelming triple-camera array with a 50MP main, 8MP ultrawide, and 2MP macro. It also has some LED lighting on the back that can act as a notification alert.

For those in China, the Realme GT Neo 5 starts at 2,599 yuan ($380-ish), but that version only supports 150W charging. To get the world’s fastest charging, you’ll have to spend 3,199 yuan (about $470) on the 240W version. The more expensive SKU doubles the RAM from 8 to 16GB, but the cheaper one actually has a slightly larger 5,000mAh battery.

Now read:

• The Nothing Phone 2 Will Launch in the US Later in 2023
• Oppo’s New 150W Charging Promises a Full Phone Battery in 15 Minutes
• EU Proposal Could Make Smartphone Batteries Removable Again

The Perseverance Mars rover has been making headlines lately as it sets up a sample depot on the red planet and makes its way toward an ancient river delta. But its predecessor is still on Mars, too, and Curiosity is making its own discoveries even after more than a decade. As it ascends Mount Sharp, Curiosity has stumbled upon a fascinating rock formation — ripples left in ancient sediment by the planet’s long-lost water.

Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been so successful that NASA opted to use its design as the base for Perseverance. It landed in Gale Crater and began making its way to Mount Sharp, the central peak of the crater. The rover was outfitted with instruments to assess the climate and geology of Mars to assess whether the conditions in the crater may have been compatible with life. Understanding the role of water in the planet’s distant past is a major element of the mission.

Last year, Curiosity reached the sulfate-bearing unit of Mount Sharp. This salt-rich region is believed to contain deposits left as the planet began drying up. However, the team didn’t expect to find evidence of waves. The rover has sent back images of a rippling texture in the rock, which was once sediment at the bottom of a body of water. “This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Curiosity discovered the wave ripples about half a mile above the base of Mount Sharp in what has been termed the “Marker Band.” This layer of dark, hard rock stands out from the rest of the rusty landscape. The rock here is so hard that Curiosity has been unable to drill a sample of it. The team is still looking for an area with softer rock to get a sample for analysis. Unlike Perseverance, Curiosity is not outfitted with the hardware to save samples for a future return to Earth — it can only do science in its onboard laboratory. Curiosity will spend a little more time hunting for the right rocks in the Marker Band, but there are more discoveries awaiting higher on Mount Sharp.

The Curiosity team is looking ahead to a valley known as Gediz Vallis, which the rover could see from a distance at several points last year. NASA believes Gediz Vallis was carved by water, and there is evidence of wet landslides. This could be one of the youngest geological features on Mount Sharp. There is currently no planned end date for the Curiosity mission — it’ll keep rolling until its deformed, perforated wheels give out.

Now read:

• Perseverance Sends Back Weather Report on Its First Full Martian Year
• Curiosity Rover Begins Summer Road Trip to Avoid Sinking Sand
• Curiosity Captures Incredible 1.8 Billion Pixel Panorama on Mars

If you’re using a recent version of Windows, Microsoft’s Edge browser will “helpfully” make itself your default PDF viewer. You might want to change that default depending on how you feel about the latest news. Microsoft and Adobe have announced that Acrobat will soon be integrated with Edge for enhanced PDF support. Microsoft seems aware of Adobe’s legacy of buggy software living inside browsers, so it’s going out of its way to talk about all the work it’s doing to make sure the new Acrobat feature is secure.

According to Microsoft, replacing its custom PDF stack with Acrobat will mean better colors, sharper graphics, improved performance, and (allegedly) more robust security. Acrobat in Edge will also enable new features like read-aloud narration and more reliable text selection in documents. All these basic capabilities will continue to be free, so you should not notice any loss of functionality as Acrobat support rolls out.

This is not a purely altruistic move by Adobe. Acrobat’s basic features are free, but it also sells premium subscriptions, and it’ll be trying to convert some of Microsoft’s 1.4 billion users to paying customers. A subscription adds features like text and image editing, file conversion, and combining files. The wording of Microsoft’s blog post is a bit vague, but it sounds like there will be an upsell built into Edge’s Acrobat interface. If you upgrade, a browser extension can be used to unlock those features. Those with a pre-existing subscription (starting at $13 per month) will also be able to use the extension to get premium features.

Until a few years ago, Adobe’s Flash platform was integrated with many browsers, but it was a security nightmare. PDF malware exists, but it’s not very common right now. Still, giving Adobe the chance to bungle browser security again is an interesting choice from Microsoft. In a separate blog post, Microsoft explains that it has implemented numerous technical countermeasures like PartitionAlloc (a secure heap implementation) and fuzzing (automated vulnerability testing). Acrobat in Edge will also be included in Microsoft’s bug bounty program, which the company hopes will encourage developers to report issues instead of turning them into exploits.

Edge is a core part of Windows 10 and 11 — you can’t even uninstall it. Microsoft is aware that Windows administrators in managed environments might not want the browser’s PDF handler to change overnight, so the rollout will happen in stages. Managed devices will have to opt-in for now, but the old Edge PDF engine will be discontinued in March 2024. For regular users, you can expect Acrobat to begin appearing in builds of Edge next month.

Now read:

• Adobe Has Made a Free Photoshop Web App
• Adobe Begins a Much-Needed Overhaul of Premiere Pro’s UI
• Microsoft Is Adding Games to the Edge Browser

OnePlus has been making Android phones for almost a decade, but it has yet to dip its toe in the tablet market. That’s about to change, though. The company, a subsidiary of Chinese mega-firm Oppo, has posted a teaser on its website showing a very green tablet with a prominent rear-facing camera.

OnePlus has an event scheduled for Feb. 7 where we expect to hear all about the new OnePlus 11 and OnePlus Buds Pro 2, but the “OnePlus Pad” might make an appearance as well, reports TechRadar. The tablet has an aluminum frame with narrow bezels around the display, and if you look closely at the teaser, there’s a small front-facing camera at the top above the screen. Aside from that, we don’t know anything specific about the hardware — not even the size.

The “smooth without equal” tagline in the promo image suggests it will have a high-refresh display, but that could also just be a clunky translation referring to something like the internal specifications. OnePlus is known for always jumping on the latest Qualcomm chips. We expect the OnePlus 11 (see below) will be one of the first phones to ship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip. A tablet with the same hardware could be very interesting, as we’re not expecting Samsung to refresh its high-end tablet lineup until later in 2023.

For years, we’ve seen Android OEMs getting out of the tablet market one by one as Google continued to ignore large form factors. Currently, only Samsung and Amazon have significant tablet offerings, with Samsung offering extremely expensive but powerful tablets while Amazon focuses on the low-end. The tablet market desperately needs something in between, and the OnePlus Pad might be it.

This is the right time for an OEM like OnePlus to take a risk on tablets, too. Google has finally started paying attention to large-format Android again. With Android 12L last year, Google added important multitasking and UI features for tablets and foldables, and Android 13 enhanced that support. That means OnePlus can build a tablet without creating its own tablet-optimized interface from scratch. Android still has a way to go before it catches up with iPadOS, but things are much better than they were just a year ago.

Now read:

• Oppo’s New 150W Charging Promises a Full Phone Battery in 15 Minutes
• OnePlus Confirms Its New Phone Won’t Have Trademark Mute Switch
• OnePlus 10 Pro Snaps in Half During Durability Test

You may think that when and if the robot apocalypse happens, we’ll be able to lock the robots up to keep humanity safe. Well, think again. A team of researchers from the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created a rudimentary robot that can become a liquid on demand, a capability the lead author compared to the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Most of the robots you’ve seen are of the “hard” variety. They’re made of solid metal, with unyielding graspers and ranges of motion dictated by the type and orientation of linear actuators. Soft robotics is an emerging field of study that seeks to build robots that are more flexible, allowing them to handle objects and navigate complex environments without the same risk of damage — to the robot as well as anyone or anything that might be nearby.

The liquid metal robot created at Carnegie Mellon, with assistance from Sun Yat-sen University and Zhejiang University, is based on gallium with embedded magnetic nanoparticles. Since Gallium has an unusually low melting point of just 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius), it’s possible to shift it between liquid and metal without any special equipment. The team calls this “magnetoactive phase transitional matter” or MPTM.

We’ve seen several soft robotics projects that use magnets for external control. But the MPTM work at Carnegie Mellon adds morphological adaptability to the equation. The magnetic nanoparticles allow the researchers to move the robots around and even generate enough heat to melt them on the spot. “When you have a metal that’s in the presence of an alternating magnetic field, we just know from fundamental principles of electromagnetism that causes basically electrical current to spontaneously flow through that metal,” lead author Carmel Majidi tells Vice.

The video above demonstrates how the tiny gallium figure is able to liquefy and squirm through the bars of its cage, just like that famous scene from Terminator 2 when the T-1000 walks through the bars. There’s one important caveat, though. While it looks like the robot returns to its original shape on its own, it had to be remolded by hand for that shot. There is currently no mechanism to control the shape of the robot with that much precision as it returns to its solid state. Maybe one day, though. The researchers see numerous potential applications for a meltable magnetic robot, including biomedicine, where it could deliver drugs or remove foreign objects from the body.

Now read:

• Harvard Scientists Invent Gripping Robot With Soft, Inflatable Tentacles
• MIT Is Working on Self-Assembling Robots
• Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot Gets Hands to Grab and Throw

The Perseverance rover has spent almost two Earth years on Mars, which is just a single Martian year. With a full seasonal cycle in the books, researchers from the University of the Basque Country in Madrid have released the first detailed weather report from Perseverance. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, explores how temperature, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure vary over time in Jezero Crater.

Perseverance is equipped with seven major scientific instruments, including the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer). This tool is under the supervision of researcher José Antonio Rodríguez-Manfredi, who works at the university’s Centre for Astrobiology (CAB). MEDA includes sensors that can monitor temperature, pressure, wind speed, humidity, and dust concentrations.

Jezero Crater is near the planet’s equator, but it never gets very warm there. Perseverance reports the average temperature is -67 degrees Fahrenheit (-55 degrees Celsius), but the temperature swings wildly throughout the day, with temperatures between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius warmer during the day than at night. As temperatures drop off at night, so does the wind. The CAB researchers report that heating of the thin Martian atmosphere generates turbulent air movements due to convection. When the sun sets, the air settles. Perseverance recorded strong winds moving to the southeast during the day, reaching speeds of 82 feet (25 meters) per second. In the afternoon, winds dropped to just 13 feet (4 meters) per second, and the wind often died completely from 4 to 6 a.m. local time.

Here, you can see the MEDA sensors extending from the rover’s mast below the iconic ChemCam.

Pressure sensors in MEDA show a marked change throughout the year. The daily thermal cycle causes its own fluctuations, of course, but the melting and refreezing of the planet’s carbon dioxide ice caps produce a denser atmosphere during the Martian summer and a thinner one in the winter.

NASA chose Jezero Crater as the landing zone because there’s a huge ancient river delta inside it that could contain evidence of ancient life. As it turns out, Jezero Crater also has an extraordinary number of whirlwinds (or dust devils, if you prefer) compared with other regions on Mars. Perseverance regularly detected very large whirlwinds measuring more than 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter.

While it’s nice to have a weather report from another world, it’s more than a novelty. A better understanding of the Martian atmosphere will help NASA plan future automated missions, as well as hypothetical future crewed Mars landings. Perseverance can pave the way while it searches for its next prized rock sample.

Now read:

• Perseverance Rover Finds Sandstone Bedrock That Could Contain Evidence of Life
• Perseverance Rover Begins Setting Up Sample Depot on Mars
• NASA’s Mars Helicopter Snags Mysterious Foreign Object on 33rd Flight