Science fiction writers have often fantasized about what it would be like to walk on Mars, and the realization of this dream is drawing closer. NASA researchers have outlined some of the conditions one might see on the Red Planet.
Andy Weir's "The Martian" begins with a violent dust storm that causes the fictional astronaut Mark Watney to become stranded on Mars. In real life, these types of dust storms do exist on Mars and can even stir up enough dust to be seen by telescopes on Earth.
"Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time," said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Aside from these annual storms, Mars also sees gigantic, planet-encircling dust storms about once every five and a half years. The storms may sound intimidating, but researchers believe even the largest of them would not be strong enough to strand an astronaut. The strongest Martian storms have top wind speeds of only about 60 miles per hour, which is less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds seen here at home. The atmosphere on Mars is about 1 percent as dense as Earth's, so it would take significantly higher winds forces to fly a kite in the Red Planet's thin atmosphere.
"The key difference between Earth and Mars is that Mars' atmospheric pressure is a lot less," said William Farrell, a plasma physicist. "So things get blown, but it's not with the same intensity."
Individual dust particles on Mars are extremely small and electrostatic, causing them to stick to surfaces. Pictures of the Curiosity rover after a drive show how filthy and coated in dust it is. Researchers are concerned this "sticky" dust could get into machinery and cause malfunctions. They are particularly worried about solar panels that could be blocked from the sun by the thick dust storms. In "The Martian," Watney regularly cleans dust off his solar panels to ensure maximum efficiency, and this could be a very real challenge that Martian astronauts would have to face.
"We really worry about power with the rovers; it's a big deal," Smith said. "The Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed in 2004, so they've only had one global dust storm to go through (in 2007) and they basically shut down operations and went into survival mode for a few weeks."
