The Martian dust storm has grown in size and is now officially a planet-encircling (or global) dust event.Curiosity, he pointed out, plus a fleet of spacecraft in the orbit of Mars will allow scientists for the first time to collect a wealth of dust information both from the surface and from space.While Opportunity is powered by sunlight, which is blotted out by dust at its current location, Curiosity has a nuclear-powered battery that runs day and night. The atmospheric haze blocking sunlight, called tau, is now above 8.6 miles (30 kilometres) away from where it stands inside the crater. Daily photos captured by its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, showed the sky getting hazier.But conditions here prevent them from spreading globally, said Ralph A. The weather conditions have prompted NASAs Opportunity rover to suspend science operations.Tau was last measured near 11 over Opportunity, thick enough that accurate measurements are no longer possible for Mars oldest active rover. In some cases, the dust clouds reach up to 40 miles (60 kilometres) or more in elevation. This spring in machine sun-obstructing wall of haze was about six to eight times thicker than normal for this time of the season. But across the planet, NASAs Curiosity rover, which has been studying Martian soil at Gale Crater, is expected to remain largely unaffected by the dust.Though Curiosity is on the other side of Mars from Opportunity, the dust has steadily increased over it, more than doubling over the weekend. For NASAs human scientists watching from the ground, Curiosity offers an unprecedented window to answer some questions.A storm of tiny dust particles has engulfed much of Mars over the last two weeks.

The largest impact is to the rovers cameras, which require extra exposure time due to the low lighting. Earth has dust storms, too, in desert regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and the southwest United States. By contrast, the current storm, if it were happening on Earth, would cover the area of North America and Russia combined, said Guzewich. Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, leading Curiositys dust storm investigation.. The last storm of global magnitude that enveloped Mars was in 2007, five years before Curiosity landed there.Curiositys engineers at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have studied the potential for the growing dust storm to affect the rovers instruments, and say it poses little risk.Though they are common, Martian dust storms typically stay contained within a local area. The rover already routinely points its Mastcam down at the ground after each use to reduce the amount of dust blowing at its optics. The dust storm may seem exotic to some Earthlings, but its not unique to Mars. This enhances the process by helping suspend the dust particles in the air. Earth also has vegetation cover on land that binds the soil with its roots and helps block the wind and rain that wash the particles out of the atmosphere.0 at Gale Crater - the highest tau the mission has ever recorded.In the animation, Curiosity was facing the crater rim, about 18. One of the biggest: Why do some Martian dust storms last for months and grow massive, while others stay small and last only a week.Carbon dioxide frozen on the winter polar cap evaporates, thickening the atmosphere and increasing the surface pressure."We dont have any good idea," said Scott D. Kahn, a Goddard senior research scientist who studies the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. The findings are made by NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center research. These include the structure of our thicker atmosphere and stronger gravity that helps settle the dust. As the atmosphere warms, winds generated by larger contrasts in surface temperature at different locations mobilize dust particles the size of individual talcum powder grains.Martian dust storms are common, especially during southern hemisphere spring and summer, when the planet is closest to the Sun.

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