English: PIA22737: Mars Climate Sounder Studies 2018 Dust Storm - WEBM File Animation

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- Drbogdan ( talk ) 14:28, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

FILE DESCRIPTION:

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22737

This animation shows the evolution of the 2018 Mars global dust storm from late May to September. The animation shows the optical depth tau -- a measure of how much light is being blocked by atmospheric dust as measured by the Mars Climate Sounder instrument onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter .

NASA's Opportunity rover is marked with a RED DOT . The dust is mapped to two opposite hemispheres of Mars, giving a view of the full globe. Certain features of the Martian terrain, including Olympus Mons , the three volcanoes (Tharsis Montes} in the equatorial region, and Valles Marineris , are also visible.

The data shows the daily global column of dust, illustrating how the dust behaves over the course of the storm. The storm has a complex growth affecting most of Mars over the first month. It then remains near the peak for three weeks. Finally, the storm starts a multi-month decay back to regular weather.

A color scale in the lower right-hand corner of the animation explains the colors in relation to approximate tau values. A tau of three indicates that only about 5 percent of the sunlight entering the atmosphere directly reaches the surface.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, and leads the Mars Climate Sounder investigation.