The Dissipation Regime of Turbulence on Mars Observed With Microphone Data From the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover

Abstract Turbulent winds are a regular occurrence in planetary boundary layers. Turbulence affects mixing, energy fluxes and forcing on the surface environment. Energy injected into an atmosphere generates eddies of many scales down to a size where molecular viscous forces dominate, termed the Kolmogorov length scale. Here, we present an analysis of the turbulent energy cascade at this scale, the transition between the inertial and dissipative regimes, for the first time on Mars. This analysis is based on data from the SuperCam microphone on the Perseverance mission. We find a distribution of power laws in the inertial regime predominantly between −3 and −1 and the distribution of the Kolmogorov length scale from 0.005 to 0.03 m. This yields estimates of the dissipation rate of turbulence between 0.0001 and 1 . We compare these values to those calculated using Monin‐Obukhov similarity theory, identifying potential shortcomings for its application on Mars without modification.