Martian Weather Forecast: Dusty

[LongTomH]

From Smithsonian Mag: Mars Weather Forecast Calls for Massive Dust Storms - Here's Why:

Mars experiences periodic dust storms, some local and some covering the whole planet's surface, blocking sunlight and lowering temperatures. Mars is likely to experience a global dust storm in the next few months.

The global dust storms may be linked to the motion of Mars around the gravitational center of the solar system. Although the sun is the most massive resident, the additional weight of its satellites means that its core isn't the midpoint of the system. Even the sun must circle the gravitational center of the solar system, causing a slight wobble in the star's orbit. This wobble has been tentatively linked to its sunspots, but for the first time, researchers are also linking it to weather on a planet.

......//snip

Large dust storms typically occur during Martian summer, and the scientists already knew that dust storms were likely to grow from large to planet-wide when summer coincided with the planet's closest approach to the sun. But storms don't occur every time Mars draws near the sun. Shirley and his team found that the storms only occur when the planet is closest to the center of the solar system, not the sun; years when the system's heart is farther from the planet escape global dust storms. The explosive growth from regional to global, Shirley and colleagues say, could be due to the Martian atmosphere receiving energy from the dance of the solar system.

If the promised storm doesn't occur this year, the scientists are calling for another, perhaps even more powerful one, in 2018, when the dust storm season again lines up with the solar system center. That storm should be 30 to 40 percent larger than expected this year. If neither year experiences a dust storm, then Shirley says it will be back to the drawing board. Still, even a failed prediction will help scientists better understand what's going on in the Martian atmosphere.

"Science advances by failing sometimes," he says.

An earlier, planet-wide dust storm obscured the surface when Mariner 9 entered Martian orbit in 1971.:

When Mariner 9 arrived at Mars on November 14, 1971, planetary scientists were surprised to find the atmosphere was thick with "a planet-wide robe of dust, the largest storm ever observed." The surface was totally obscured. Mariner 9's computer was thus reprogrammed from Earth to delay imaging of the surface for a couple of months until the dust settled. The main surface imaging did not get underway until mid-January 1972. However, surface-obscured images did contribute to the collection of Mars science, including understanding of the existence of several huge high-altitude volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge that gradually became visible as the dust storm abated. This unexpected situation made a strong case for the desirability of studying a planet from orbit rather than merely flying past. It also highlighted the importance of flexible mission software. The Soviet Union's Mars 2 and Mars 3 probes, which arrived during the same dust storm, were unable to adapt to the unexpected conditions, which severely limited the amount of data that they were able to collect.

[world wide wally]

1. A thought just occurred to me for you climate change deniers

If climate change is cyclical and is driven by the Sun, and human activity has no effect on it; why isn't Mars heating up.
It is relatively close to Earth in terms of distance to the Sun