NASA: Massive Dust Storm on Mars Could Shut Down "Opportunity" Rover

NASA is currently tracking a massive dust storm on Mars that is causing some remarkable atmospheric changes on the Red Planet.

According to the Los Angeles Times on Monday, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and two planet-based explorers first spotted the storm on Nov. 10 in the Southern Hemisphere of the planet. While its size only classifies it as a "regional" storm, the weather event has caused air pressure on both sides of Mars to drop and temperatures on the opposite poles of the planet to increase thanks to the changing circulation of the atmosphere.

"For the first time since the Viking missions of the 1970s, we are studying a regional dust storm both from orbit and with a weather station on the surface," Rich Zurek, chief Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge said in a news statement Wednesday.

The storm could affect NASA's robot, Opportunity, if it continues to spread out, NASA warns, as the rover needs solar energy for its power supply. The rover is within 900 miles of the storm. Curiosity, the other rover, runs on nuclear power.

"More dust in the air or falling onto its solar panels would reduce the solar-powered rover's energy supply for daily operations," NASA said.

Zurek notes that the dust storm is already covering large parts of Mars.

"It has covered a fairly extensive region with its dust haze and it is in a part of the planet where some regional storms in the past have grown into global dust hazes," he said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

However, the dust storm's expansion could give NASA scientists--with the help of the rovers and the Reconnaissance Orbiter--a view of the storm the likes of which they have never seen before.

"One thing we want to learn is why do some Martian dust storms get to this size and stop growing, while others this size keep growing and go global," Zurek said.

Similar such storms had expanded and affected large parts of Mars in 2001 and 2007. NASA experts who have analyzed Mars for decades have come to the conclusion that there are seasonal patterns to the largest Martian dust storms.