Mars is currently blanketed by a large dust storm. We first starting seeing it in late June. The MARCI instrument returns global daily mosaics of the planet, which we use like a weather report. These showed several dusty areas, and we had some hopes they would remain merely “regional.” However, in the following days, the storm activity increased, and winds blew the dust around the planet. Most of our images started coming back clouded over with dust. Some are just hazy, and some are completely obscured. Our Principal Investigator, Alfred McEwen, recently pointed out that this dust storm currently active in the Saharan desert on Earth looks very familiar!

At this point, the storm is considered a “hemispherical event,” meaning it’s mainly affecting “only” half of the planet (the southern hemisphere, in this case). We have our fingers crossed that this will not expand and become a global event like the 2001 dust storm.

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I thought I’d offer a few more words as to what is done with images at HiROC. Validation has been mentioned in the blog, and I’d like to explain a bit more about that. I’ve been involved in writing the primary validation tool, HiVali, and I will be the primary student validator for the next month. (The regular student validators are from out of state, and are going home for the Christmas holidays. I’m from around here, and offered my services to look at pretty pictures from Mars all day;-))

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