Curiosity rover captures the Mars dust storm

NASA’s Curiosity rover has beamed back pictures of a dust storm that has engulfed much of Mars over the last two weeks and prompted NASA’s Opportunity rover to suspend science operations, the US space agency said today.

However, the Curiosity rover, which has been studying Martian soil at Gale Crater, is expected to remain largely unaffected by the dust.

While Opportunity is powered by sunlight, which is blotted out by dust at its current location, Curiosity has a nuclear-powered battery that runs day and night. The Martian dust storm has grown in size and is now officially a ‘planet encircling’ dust event.

Though Curiosity is on the other side of Mars from Opportunity, dust has steadily increased over it, more than doubling over the weekend.

The atmospheric haze blocking sunlight, called ‘tau’, is now above 8.0 at Gale Crater - the highest tau the mission has ever recorded. Tau was last measured near 11 over Opportunity, thick enough that accurate measurements are no longer possible for Mars’ oldest active rover.

Curiosity along with a fleet of spacecraft in the orbit of Mars, will allow scientists for the first time to collect a wealth of dust information both from the surface and from space. The last storm of global magnitude that enveloped Mars was in 2007, five years before Curiosity landed there.