Craft tracks giant dust storm on Mars
By Ron Cowen
It’s the beginning of dust season on Mars, and the first dust storm is a whopper. Engulfing the entire planet, the storm is the largest observed on the Red Planet in the past 25 years and already has raised the temperature of the frigid Martian atmosphere by 30C.
Daily observations by a temperature and dust detector aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft revealed the storm on June 15. At that time, the storm amounted to a small cloud confined to Hellas Basin, a 9-kilometer-deep crater in the southern hemisphere.