Scientists studied the Weather patterns that cause massive dust storms on the surface of Mars — phenomenon that causes particles to reach cover millions of square meters of the planet and last for days .
The objective of the research was to take the first step towards predicting these extreme conditions and helping with the planning of rovers that land on the planet and future Martian missions that may be influenced by storms.
The results obtained will be presented this Tuesday (10), at the 2024 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Using data from NASA’s (United States Space Agency) Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite, they detected two main patterns of sandstorms: the sudden increase in the planet’s surface temperature — which preceded approximately 68% of major phenomena — and the periodicity in the second half of the Martian year (a year on Mars lasts 687 Earth days).
“When you heat the surface, the layer of atmosphere just above it becomes buoyant and can rise, taking dust with it,” said Heshani Pieris, a graduate student at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.
In 2018, a sandstorm buried the solar panels of the Opportunity rover, also from the US agency, and caused it to stop working soon after.
However, scientists highlighted in the study that the scene from the 2015 film “The Martian”, starring Matt Damon, is not related to what a Martian gale actually is.
According to the document, these storms cannot generate enough force to knock down a satellite dish and throw astronauts into the air, as portrayed in the film.
The findings obtained from the research are the first step towards predicting the weather conditions on Mars — as we do on Earth — and, in the future, scientists want to be able to look at live data coming from the Red Planet and predict what might happen in the coming weeks.
This content was originally published in Scientists discover the causes of the dust storms that engulf Mars on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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