Dust Storm Options

[Nirgal]

There is fresh activity being seen VERY close to Opportunity, as visible in some of the imaging done earlier today.

OMG this is outstanding spectacular !

from the estimated spreading rate at 35mph and the close location to Opportunity it must be visibily already in the current images (at least as substantial darkening of the sky)
Too bad that the exploratorium site is down right now

So what does this storm mean for the rover ?

hopefully the degradation of solar power will be not too bad to kill the rover
eventually..

on the other hand: if Oppy survives this, then chances are that the panel are
more clean than before due to the dust cleaning effects of the high wind speeds...

This is going to become a really exciting development

[JRehling]

Whoah !!! thats close.  Would Opportunity be able to see this in the sky?

I'm not sure how "tall" a martian dust storm is. A 100 meter object would be just visible from about 20 km away. But, given that the object is dust, and the background is the already-dusty sky of Mars, it might have to be a lot closer to be visible. The easiest way to detect it would be to notice the setting sun passing into the storm.

Given the speed at which the storm is traveling, it could arrive before any image seeing it in the distance is taken -- unless an imaging campaign devoted to this is undertaken.

[Rakhir]

"Opportunity has seen some signs of the dust storm, which is apparently nearby.

Opportunity showed elevated dust levels, which were measured at an optical depth of about 1.4. The largest dust storm experienced by the rover occurred in June and rated an optical depth of about 2.

For comparison, a smoggy day in Los Angeles would rate an optical depth of about 1.0, and moderate days on Mars are about 0.5

"We started seeing more and more dusting on the solar panels," Mark Lemmon added. "And we have indirect evidence that these storms are windy. We've seen material blown out of the rover tracks over the last two weeks."

Meanwhile, Spirit has found some signs of additional atmospheric dust at Gusev Crater. She detected an optical depth of about 0.6"

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/051028_mars_storm.html

Rakhir

[mike]

There is also an animation [of the growing Mars dust storm] now on the ASO web site.

Do you have the URL handy? I'm not familiar with ASO's web site, and I've been unable to find any obvious link to this animation thus far..

[Tman]

Mike, you have to start with the link and guidance in my post#26. http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...indpost&p=24766

It's also the site where they show the pictures and the animation.

[Vladimorka]

http://www.arksky.org/smf/index.php?topic=833.0

[helvick]

Just wondering if the "extraordinary" brightness of this dust\storm\wotsit event is related to opposition surge:

On 28 October 09:08 UT and 7 November 04:10 UT Jim Bell (Cornell University) and the Hubble Heritage team will observe Mars. The first date will be near Mars closest approach and the second near Mars opposition. This particular observation will be the closest to zero phase angle ever observed with HST and one of the scientific efforts will be to study the "opposition surge" effect.

From Marswatch

[Bill Harris]

On the FwdHazcam and RearHazcam images from Sol 625 I thought that both looked a bit "hazy" with bright shadows.

Fwd HazCam

Rear HazCam


--Bill

[RNeuhaus]

On the FwdHazcam and RearHazcam images from Sol 625 I thought that both looked a bit "hazy" with bright shadows.

Fwd HazCam

Rear HazCam
--Bill

However, these pictures were taken three days ago. Now it is sol 628. The Tau would be around 1.4 (like almost sunset) and the worst that Oppy has experienced was around 2.0 on June of last year. After that, the wind will clean again the dust from plan solars and hope it would be even better when it is close to Mogollon rim.

Rodolfo

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

I wish we could get to see some dust storm images from Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyour and Mars Express.

[slinted]

Dr. Sherrod has captured the storm activity again tonight, to which I've added Opportunity's position.

[helvick]

How frequently do global dust storms occur on Mars? I know there was one in 2001 and one in 1971 but that's all I'm aware of. Surely there must have been many more recorded in the last century.

The odds on a major planet encircling storm seem to be around 20% per Martian year or one every decade or so for us Earthlings. The last global storm was in 2001 - heres a nice write up and animation from TES .

Previous major storms were seen in 1909, 1924, 1956, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977 (twice) and 1982 although apparently only the 1971 event is considered global in that it obscured the whole planet apart from the tops of the Tharsis peaks. Nice write up here by Jeff Beish

There was a fairly significant non planetwide storm in 2003 that was concentrated in Hellas and lasted for most of December 2003.

[Bill Harris]

Could the dust storm be a serious matter for our intrepid explorer? I am assuming that if the dust storm does hit and decrease the solar panel output to below the minimum, Oppy can go into a deep sleep mode and wait the storm out, waking up once the storm clears. And if the solar panels get dusted over, we'll wait for a cleaning event. Or am I too accustomed to Oppy being The Energizer Mars Rover?

--Bill

[Bob Shaw]

Could the dust storm be a serious matter for our intrepid explorer?  I am assuming that if the dust storm does hit and decrease the solar panel output to below the minimum, Oppy can go into a deep sleep mode and wait the storm out, waking up once the storm clears.  And if the solar panels get dusted over, we'll wait for a cleaning event.  Or am I too accustomed to Oppy being The Energizer Mars Rover?

--Bill

Bill:

We're talking End Of Mission!

Bob Shaw

[Bill Harris]

That's what I was afraid of...

--Bill