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Tomasz Nowakowski
June 25, 2018
A self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity rover on Sol 2082 (June 15, 2018). A Martian dust storm reduced sunlight and visibility at the mobile site in the crater of Gale. A drill hole can be seen in the rock to the left of the rover at a target site called "Duluth". Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
NASA Curiosity Mars rover has captured some great pictures of a mist that blocks the sunlight as it thickens during the ongoing dust storm. The storm has grown in size and is now officially classified by NASA as global dust event.
Curiosity's MastCam has captured imagery of increasingly dusty conditions at the surface of the red planet. Image credit: NASA
Images acquired by Curiosity earlier this month (June 2018) shows the sky of Mars becoming progressively more foggy. The rover, which studies the potentially habitable conditions on the red planet, is currently in the crater of Gale where recent measurements show that the level of atmospheric opacity (the so-called tau level) was 8.0. This is the highest level of tau Curiosity Rover has never recorded.
NASA reports that the haze is about six to eight times thicker than normal for this time of the season. The agency noted that the level of dust in the area Curiosity operates, more than doubled over the weekend from June 16 to 17 only.
The current dust storm has been designated by the space agency as "encircling the planet". This is due to the fact that this storm covers a large part of Mars unlike Martian dust storms that are generally limited to local areas. According to Scott D. Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, if such conditions were to occur on Earth, they would be larger than North America and Russia united.
The Mars Color Imager (MARCI) NASA's Mars Embedded Instrument (MRO) provided an overall view of the growing dust storm. The images show that it began in early June as a major atmospheric event on a regional scale and began to spread along the northern hemisphere. Tharsis On June 10, the storm covered an area of more than 11.5 million square miles (30 million square kilometers).
Curiosity Engineers say that the storm poses no risk to mission operations and that it should not affect the instruments of the rover.
"The most important impact is on the rover cameras, which require additional exposure time due to poor lighting. The rover systematically points his Mastcam down to the ground after each use in order to reduce the amount of dust that blows on its optics, "NASA said in a statement issued by the agency.
However, while Curiosity is powered by nuclear power and therefore does not depend on solar energy, the other operational rover of NASA on Mars, Opportunity, is powered by Sunlight now blocked by thickening haze.
Last week, NASA revealed that it had lost touch withOppy"Rover, adding that the engineers do not expect to hear the robot until the sky starts to clear above." The last tau level measurements made by this mobile indicated a value of almost 11.0.
NASA scientists hope that Curiosity, which will work during the global dust storm, can collect valuable data that could enhance our understanding of these unique phenomena on Earth – but common on the red planet. In particular, researchers are interested in finding out why some Martian dust storms last for months and become massive, while others remain small and last only a week.
The changes made by the dust storm can be clearly seen in this image taken by MastCam of the rover. Image credit: NASA
Tagged: Curiosity Dust Storm Mars NASA Opportunity rover The Range
Tomasz Nowakowski
Tomasz Nowakowski is the owner of Astro Watch, one of the leading blogs of astronomy and science on the Internet. Nowakowski contacted SpaceFlight Insider to collaborate on the two space-related websites. The generous offer of Nowakowski was greeted with gratitude by the two organizations that are now working to better relay important developments with regard to space exploration.
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