Here is an August 29th Planetary Society update regarding the ongoing dust storms on Mars.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/0829_Ma...ove_Out_of.html

Dust- phooey. The MERs will live to fight many more sols, and we are richer for the knowledge. What great data from this storm, what invaluable information for the future of Martian UMSF! (Although I admit that RTGs are just plain the way to go on any planetary surface with any atmosphere to speak of, and also anywhere outside the orbit of Mars... )

I'm not sure what the point is in the dust removal discussion. Using the existing design a planned 90 sol mission has lasted 1299 sols and counting. Since we have experienced significant cleaning events in two separate locations, it is fair to assume that such events will occur over much of the surface. Any design add-ons, no matter how clever, introduce more potential failure modes to the system, and with respect to tilting panels etc, the failure would be catastrophic. Given the performance of the solar power system to date the benefit of any add-ons would not seem to offset the associated risks and weight penalties.

O hi Homie, I'm from season 5, can you guess the episode? What are we up to in Whrs now? >300?

Wow -- up to 300 WHrs and we're rejoicing, while at the same time I've been re-reading Squyres' "Roving Mars" and ran across the discussion of Oppy circling Endurance as her first Martian winter approached. The comment is made that she was dropping down to only 500 WHrs in power, which was characterized as "crippling."

My, how we've progressed...

-the other Doug

Remember that the rovers require more power in the winter, and on dust-free nights to keep warm. We've survived on less than 200 for a short time, but it's not clear what we would need to survive winter nights.

Not fully sure of that. Have a look at any picture of Gussev from above and you'll se that Spirit has been landed in a place where we can see A LOT of DD's path.

Emily, in all seriousness, you should submit that to Edward Tufte as an example of a way to present a huge amount of data in a compact and interpretable form.

Aw, shucks. I'm a devotee of Tufte. However, to be worthy of him there should be at least two other kinds of information presented in the same graphic...

--Emily

But the DD do not seem to be the cause of the overnight cleaning events. Also there are no DD at Meridiani, so the cleaning events are likely due to wind gusts rather than a function of DD activity.

Fox News is carrying an AP story on the "very old rovers' HERE.

The story sez, "During the storm, each of the rovers spent a couple of weeks sleeping most of the time."

Didn't they spend a lot more than a couple of weeks sleeping most of the time?

> Also there are no DD at Meridiani...

That is a rather silly theory to postulate. We see dust devils and dust devil tracks at Gusev because there is abundant dust that is mobile and this makes the dust devils and tracks visible. At Meridiani, there is much less dust available because of the blueberry 'desert pavement' that armors and protects the subsurface from supplying mobile dust. Just because we can't see 'em does not mean that DD aren't here...

What you are saying is dust devils cannot be seen in Meridiani because there is no dust there, but it doesn't mean that there are no dust devils there. Don't dust devils require dust by definition?

Dust devils don't require dust to form (at least to my poor knowledge), it's just their manifestation in which they kick up dust that earned them that name.

Perhaps an overlooked update on Mark Lemmons webpage

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mer_dd.html



So long Dust Storm 07