Inside Martian Dust Storms with the Mars Exploration Rovers' Pancam

Details Inside Martian Dust Storms with the Mars Exploration Rovers' Pancam Inside Martian Dust Storms with the Mars Exploration Rovers' Pancam

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.1703l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #17.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.441

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Near the end of 2006, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity entered their second dust storm season on Mars. At the rovers' sites, the season was mild compared to their first Mars year, until nearly LSun 270 (the southern summer solstice). The visible optical depth of the dust was near unity for both rovers, typical of non-storm values from the previous perihelion/summer season. This is elevated from optical depths near 0.2-0.3 (Spirit) or 0.5 (Opportunity) through the aphelion/winter season. Around LSun 265, Opportunity and later Spirit experienced an increase in atmospheric dust to optical depths in excess of 4, in addition to seeing dust lifting and local aeolian transport. The solar powered rovers were entered into a low power mode to attempt to survive the storms.
During the waxing of the storms both rovers obtained sky imaging to characterize the dust, which will be presented in this work. The imaging included Sun images to monitor optical depth, horizon images to assess sky color and brightness under changing optical depth conditions, and sky images to characterize scattering of light by the dust. The latter data will be modeled to constrain the size distribution of the dust and its visible/near-infrared absorption spectrum, for comparison to similar pre-storm models.

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