Weather research on Mars has turned up a new hazard inside the Martian Year 34 global dust storm: localized electric fields in the lower atmosphere during mid-2018 that approached breakdown-favorable conditions. Chali Idosa Uga, the lead author, said major dust storms should be treated as structured electrostatic environments, not only visibility and thermal events.
“For future Mars exploration, our study suggests that major dust storms should be evaluated not only as atmospheric, thermal and visibility hazards, but also as structured electrostatic environments,” he said. The work was built from Martian Year 34 data in Mars Climate Database v.6.1, with Martian Year 34 running from May 5, 2017 to March 23, 2019.
Martian Year 34 and mid-2018
The study focused on the mid-2018 global dust storm, and the team found electric fields in Mars’s lower atmosphere during that event. Martian dust storms can blanket the planet at once, block sunlight, and make the surface completely unobservable, which is why the charge buildup is a practical problem for future Mars missions as well as a weather one.
One Martian Year equals 687 Earth days, and tracking of Martian Years began in 2000. That frame let the researchers place the mid-2018 storm inside a longer dust-storm cycle instead of treating it as a one-off event.
Uga on charge separation
“We do not quantify risk to a specific spacecraft, habitat, instrument or communication system. What we show is that during the Martian Year 34 global dust storm, the lower atmosphere developed localized and altitude-dependent regions where charge separation could persist, and modeled electric fields approached breakdown-favorable conditions.”
That leaves the study with a sharp practical line. The fields were strong enough to raise concern, but not mapped to one named vehicle or instrument, so the finding changes the hazard list for Future Mars without translating into a mission-by-mission risk estimate.
Opportunity, Curiosity, and orbiters
The mid-2018 global dust storm was tracked by Curiosity from Gale Crater, and it brought Opportunity to an end after sunlight was drastically diminished and the rover could not recharge its batteries. Dust devils had previously cleaned Opportunity’s solar panels, which helped it survive far beyond its estimated lifetime before the storm cut that advantage off.
NASA’s MRO, MAVEN, and ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter also monitored how the storm influenced global wind patterns, atmospheric water vapor, and solar heating across Mars. The new result adds electrical structure to that list, and the unresolved question is how strong those fields were across the storm’s most active layers.
