DUST STORM on Mars
It’s been a dark time for Mars this summer
MAY TO AUGUST
It might have been a sunny summer for the UK, but the same has not been true on Mars. The Sun disappeared from Martian skies as the Red Planet was ravaged by a global dust storm, which went on and on and on…
Mars is engulfed by large, dust-bearing clouds every few Martian years, but previously we’ve only ever watched them from afar. This year, however, there were four spacecraft in orbit around Mars and two rovers on the ground, giving us a front row seat. In fact, it was the Opportunity rover that gave the first sign a big storm was on its way.
“We measured the dust opacity, that’s a measure of the extinction of sunlight as it goes through the atmosphere,” says Zurek. “In the last attempted measurement, Opportunity couldn’t even find the disc of the Sun.”
The lack of light quickly proved problematic for the rover as it is solar powered – no sunlight means no power. Opportunity went into hibernation on 10 June and, at the time of writing, had yet to reawaken. However, the other Martian explorers continued to keep an eye on the storm as it grew, blew and then eventually waned at the end of August.
“We’re trying to understand the climate of Mars today,” says Zurek. “Why in some years are there global storms, but not other years? Eventually we’d like to have better predictions of these events; at least a climate forecast for dust storms on Mars.”