Tech & Biz

Red Storm: Martian Dust Chokes Rovers

by Jordan Yerman | July 21, 2007 at 10:13 am

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Getting stranded on an alien planet sounds bad enough, but throw in a gargantuan dust storm and things get very interesting indeed... NASA's solar-powered martian rovers are getting starved of precious sunlight by massive dust storms. Should the rovers lose power completely, their heating units will fail, causing the explore-bots to freeze.

Huge dust storms raging on Mars pose the worst threat yet to Nasa's robot rovers, the US space agency has said.

Dust is starving the rovers of power by blocking out the sunlight needed to charge their batteries.

The six-wheeled, solar-powered rovers - Opportunity and Spirit - are operating at two distant sites just south of the Martian equator.

A series of dust storms have dogged the rovers for a month, and could continue for several more days, if not weeks.

If the sunlight is further reduced over an extended period, the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to operate or keep themselves warm.

In an effort to protect the rovers from power loss that has the potential to leave one or both permanently disabled, the US space agency has been scaling back their functions to the bare minimum, leaving them in near-dormant states.

"We're rooting for our rovers to survive these storms, but they were never designed for conditions this intense," said Nasa's Alan Stern.