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The huge dust storm that plagues Mars is a curse for NASA's Rover Opportunity, but a blessing for the other missions of Red Planet's space agency
because of all the dusts that block the light in the air. Members of the mission team believe that the six-wheeled rover, which has been exploring Mars since January 2004, has put itself into a kind of hibernation, and they are cautiously optimistic that Opportunity will wake up when the dust will dissipate.
Unfortunately, may take a while. [Mars Dust Storm 2018: How It Grew & What It Means for the Opportunity Rover]
"Based on the longevity of a global storm in 2001, NASA scientists estimate that it could be early September before the haze has cleared enough to allow Opportunity to restart. NASA officials wrote on Wednesday. 18)
But other agency missions are taking advantage of a rare opportunity – global dust storms engulf the red planet once every six or eight Earth years – to learn more about Martian atmosphere and climate.
Curiosity, the youngest cousin of Opportunity, studies the size and distribution of dust particles in the air of the Red Planet using a variety of instruments, including its weather station board. (Curiosity is nuclear-fueled and therefore largely dust-free.)
Curiosity weather data could also shed light on how sandstorms affect Martian "atmospheric tides", which are pressure waves in the atmosphere. The air of the planet. Members said, "We are working in duplication now," said NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Curiosity Ashwin Vasavada, a project scientist in Pasadena, California, in the same statement. "Our newly returned drill rig is acquiring a sample of fresh rock, but we also use instruments to study the evolution of the dust storm."
Then there is has the view from above. Three NASA orbiters are intensely monitoring the storm, which began on a localized scale in late May and globalized on June 20th.
Researchers use the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument aboard the NASA Mars Odyssey Orbiter. "This is one of the most important meteorological phenomena we have seen on Mars" since the start of spacecraft sightings in the 1960s, Michael Smith, a member of the THEMIS team A scientist at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the same release. "Having another example of a dust storm really helps us understand what's going on."
THEMIS team increased the pace of the overall measurements of the instrument from one time to the next. ten days before the dust storm to twice a week. Smith added.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which detected the storm for the first time on May 30, uses two instruments to track its evolution and its effects on atmospheric temperatures. NASA officials said, "As the dust in the atmosphere absorbs solar energy and heats up, the wind regimes can change, lifting more dust off the surface of the planet.
These side-by-side animations, with the kind permission of Mars Color Imager NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter camera, show how dust has enveloped the red planet from May 2018 (left) to July 2018 (to right).
Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
A better understanding of these details, The data provided by Odyssey and MRO could help researchers understand why some Martian dust storms are breaking down on localized business and others on the global scale, according to NASA officials.
The Orbiter Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution of the agency the effects of higher storm, where the air of the red planet meets the emptiness of space. The main goal of MAVEN is to better understand how Mars lost its once-thick atmosphere, a crucial event that made the planet's climate go from hot and humid to cold and dry.
MAVEN's observations have already revealed that Mars air was stripped by charged particles from the sun, and that the damage began to occur about 4.2 billion years ago. when the red planet lost its global magnetic field.
The current situation provides an opportunity to better understand the role, if any, of large dust storms in the process of stripping the atmosphere, said members of the team of MAVEN. For example, does the resulting warming of the atmosphere cause more air molecules to go out into space?
Since MAVEN arrived in March in September 2014, "one of the things we expected was a global dust storm". says MAVEN Principal Investigator, Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at Boulder.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom Facebook or Google+. Published originally on Space.com
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