NASA

Persevering Through the Storm

It’s dust-storm season on Mars! Over the past couple of weeks, as we ascended the Jezero Crater rim, our science team has monitored increasing dust in the atmosphere — typically highest around this time of the Martian year.

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Sep 6, 2024 - 09:00

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Persevering Through the Storm

A color image from the Martian surface shows dunes extending from the left side of the frame down toward the bottom right corner, barely visible through a thick haze of pale yellowish-orange that covers the entire scene.

A region-wide seasonal dust storm obscures the Jezero Crater in this image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, acquired using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. Perseverance captured the image on Aug. 20, 2024 (Sol 1244, or Martian day 1,244 of the Mars 2020 mission) at the local mean solar time of 16:05:34. This image is part of a Mastcam-Z mosaic of the “northern fan,” a part of Jezero Crater that Perseverance never drove through, but is an area that’s thought to have been deposited in a similar way to the delta that the rover did explore.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

It is dust-storm season on Mars! Over the past couple of weeks, as we have been ascending the Jezero Crater rim, our science team has been monitoring rising amounts of dust in the atmosphere. This is expected: Dust activity is typically highest around this time of the Martian year (early Spring in the northern hemisphere). The increased dust has made our views back toward the crater hazier than usual, and provided our atmospheric scientists with a great opportunity to study the way that dust storms form, develop, and spread around the planet.

Perseverance has a suite of scientific instruments well-suited to study the Martian atmosphere. The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) provides regular weather reports, the cadence of which has increased during the storm to maximize our science. We also routinely point our Mastcam-Z imager toward the sky to assess the optical density (“tau”) of the atmosphere.

There are not any signs that this regional dust storm will become planetwide — like the global dust storm in 2018 — but every day we are assessing new atmospheric data. Hopefully the skies will further clear up as we continue to climb in the coming weeks, because we are expecting stunning views of the crater floor and Jezero delta. This will offer the Perseverance team a unique chance to reflect on the tens of kilometers we have driven and years we have spent exploring Mars together.

Written by Henry Manelski, Ph.D. student at Purdue University