If you ’ve seen the movieThe Martianor , better yet , take the book , you ’ll eff that our hero Mark Watney has to fence with wild dust storms on Mars . And a singular study has suggested we can omen when the next major planet - encompass storm will come , and it might just be week forth .
At the starting ofThe Martian , Watney is allow for stranded on Mars by a red storm . This character of stormisn’t realistic , as the breeze press is so low on Mars that a storm there is tantamount to someone breathing on you .
But what is more realistic is that , in the book and not the flick , a huge dust storm gradually descend on Watney later on on , specify the amount of solar mightiness available to him . It ’s so gradual that it ’s almost undetectable , but we sleep with these sort of storms hap . The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity had to contend with such an event in 2007 , reducing their daily operations to almost zero .
And in a written report print in the journalIcarus , James Shirley , a planetary scientist at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) in Pasadena , California , aver we can predict when the next will occur .
It take Mars 1.9 Earth old age to orbit the Sun , and when the southern region experiences its summer while closer to the Sun , localise junk storms often occur . On rarefied occasions , these tempest grow massively , and comprehend the entire planet in dust . This wasthe scenefor the Mariner 9 probe when it arrived in sphere around Mars in 1971 , find the entire major planet wrapped in junk .
So far , it ’s been unclear why a storm go globose . But Shirley says he has find a correlation with the orbital cavity of Mars around the Solar System , specifically the Solar System ’s center of mass , its barycenter .
The centre of mass is not , as you might call up , at the center of the Sun , but actually move around the Sun depending on the positions of the planets . The orbits of the planet are not totally circular , which means that their angulate impulse , or hurrying , changes as they revolve .
For Mars , Shirley enounce this can excuse the global dust storms . When the momentum is higher , there is an increase surface tip speed , which can spread the junk across the satellite more . The momentum goes through cycle of 2.2 years , which is longer than the Martian twelvemonth , but the global dust storms seemed to occur when the momentum was increasing during the start of the dust storm season . No global detritus storms were found when the momentum was decreasing during this time .
The last five observed globose storms were in 1977 , 1982 , 1994 , 2001 , and 2007 , and almost all seemed to correlate with this idea . And that means we can foretell the next one , because Mars is now showingsimilar signsto when it experienced previous spheric violent storm .
“ Mars will accomplish the midpoint of its current debris storm time of year on October 29 of this twelvemonth , ” said Shirley in astatement . “ base on the historical radiation pattern we find , we believe it is very likely that a global dust storm will begin within a few workweek or calendar month of this particular date . ”
He observe in his paper that correlation does not necessarily adequate causing . There may be other factors at bid , and this relationship between the angular impulse and spherical junk tempest may be a coincidence . But if his anticipation holds true , and there is a global storm before the remnant of the class , then the possibility could be right . There are a bit of spacecraft in orbit that will be able to observe Mars during this clock time and see if it occurs .
And that has important implications for succeeding missions to Mars . With NASA planning to send humans there in the 2030s , and Elon Musk ’s SpaceX aiming foreven sooner , interpret Martian storms will be key . They can dramatically repress the amount of solar power available , just as Watney receive , so we ’ll need to prepare the astronauts for these events .
Knowing when they will occur could prove invaluable , and ensure the survival of the first Martian explorers .
