It's getting worse. The spectacular dust storm that has plunged a large part of Mars into darkness in the last two weeks has grown in size and is now officially "global". The phenomenon caused NASA's historic rover Opportunity to suspend its scientific operations, but another explorer robot arrived in 2012, Curiosity, which is currently studying the soil of a place known as Gale Crater, will not be affected by dust. The reason is that although your old companion can not work without sunlight-which is not received by the storm, the most modern has a battery of nuclear energy that works day and night. He has even been able to take a selfie in the storm.
Although Curiosity is on the other side of the planet with respect to Opportunity, which transits through the Valley of Perseverance, the dust has steadily increased over it, more than doubled over the weekend. The "tau", the index that measures the opacity of the haze, is now above 8.0 in the Gale crater, the highest that the mission has recorded. The last time it was measured on Opportunity was close to 11, enough so that the oldest active rover on Mars (it has been on the Red Planet for fifteen years) can not make precise measurements. If you consider that a storm that Opportunity barely survived in 2007 reached a tau of 5.5, things do not look very good for the veteran.
But NASA scientists also see the positive side of things. As they explain, Curiosity offers an unprecedented possibility to answer some questions. Why do some Martian dust storms last for months and become massive, while others remain small and last only a week? "We have no idea," says Scott D. Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Who leads Curiosity's dust storm investigation.
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