Professor Hanington Speaks Science: A Huge Storm Strikes March This Week | Lifestyle

The probe called Opportunity has explored the planet for more than 14 years, having been launched when George Bush was in the White House. The Martian dust storm has grown and officially became a dust phenomenon around the planet.

A storm of tiny dust particles submerged much of Mars over the last two weeks and prompted NASA's rover Opportunity to postpone its crossing. Another rover, NASA's Curiosity, located almost on the other side of the planet, seems to be unaffected by the great storm and continues to study Martian soil at Crater Gale in search of signs of old life

which is erased by dust at its current location, Curiosity has a nuclear battery that works day and night. Yet, the atmospheric mist blocking sunlight, called "tau", is now above 8.0 at Gale Crater and is the highest tau value ever recorded by the mission at this location. The tau value by the suspended Opportunity was greater than 11 and large enough that accurate measurements are no longer possible.

Unique weather patterns on Mars have been recorded from Earth observatories for centuries. That Mars even has an atmosphere was first deduced by William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, who published an article in 1784 on observing the stars occluding Mars in his journey around the sun. Because Herschel had built one of the best telescopes in the world at that time, he was the first to observe the polar ice caps, tilting his axis, the diameter of the planet and its atmosphere. When Mars seemed to pass near the two faint stars without any effect on their brightness, Herschel correctly concluded that there was little atmosphere around the planet to interfere with their light.

A few decades later, Honore Flaugergues, distinguished astronomer of Viviers, France discovered "yellow clouds" on the surface of Mars, considered the first known observation of Martian dust storms. We also remember being the first to notice the seasonal shrinkage of the polar ice caps during the Martian spring. It was only in 1870 that the Greek astronomer Eugene M. Antoniadi explained that these yellow clouds were simply sand or dust in the fine atmosphere.

Early astronomers also detected blue clouds on the planet. These were thin mists of high altitude and were widely regarded as composed of ice crystals, or considering the finesse of the atmosphere, tiny crystals of carbon dioxide as an alternative possibility. It is now known probes that have landed on the planet in the last forty years that the blue color is not caused by ice-water clouds, but by the Martian dust itself . The dust in the atmosphere absorbs the blue light, giving the sky its red color, but it also diffuses some of the blue light in the area surrounding the Sun due to its particle size.

the hemisphere in spring and summer, when the planet is closest to the Sun, allowing a warmer atmosphere and the possibility of high surface winds. At this time, the polar caps lose much of their carbon dioxide, allowing the gas to increase the pressure of the atmosphere where the dust particles congregate. In some cases, dust clouds reach up to 40 miles or more in altitude. While dust storms may seem rare on Earth, all you have to do is look up at the terrible region of the 1930s where much of the central region of the United States was a continuous dust storm

planet, local dust storms seem to be common. On the other hand, the current storm, if it occurred on Earth, would be big news. It will be a danger to which humans will have to prepare when we travel to this world in the 2020s.