Canadian weather station on Mars brings you daily weather updates

One of the ‘cool­er’ pieces of sci­ence being done on Mars by NAS­A’s Phoenix lander is the study of Mar­tian weath­er pat­terns, cour­tesy of a ‘built-in-Canada’ weath­er sta­tion. A daily spinoff of this is the daily Mar­tian weath­er report. Due to a com­mu­nic­a­tions glitch, the report­ing should begin tomorrow.

On a loc­al note, the Cana­dian Sci­ence Team at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta have a sig­ni­fic­ant stake in the Phoenix Mission:

When the ori­gin­ally planned anem­o­met­er for Phoenix was descoped,
Pro­fess­or Car­los Lange and his stu­dents demon­strated that a telltale
could be used to indic­ate wind speed and dir­ec­tion with help of the
onboard cam­era. He then helped research­ers at the Uni­ver­sity of Aarhus,
Den­mark, devel­op and test the tell­tale wind sensor that is now mounted
on top of the Cana­dian MET mast on Phoenix. For Phoenix, Dr. Lange uses
advanced Com­pu­ta­tion­al Flu­id Dynam­ics (CFD) tools to sim­u­late the
Mar­tian environment.