BRENT: Martian dust storms rank among the most impressive in our Solar System. But no matter how menacing they appear from Mars orbit, they’re not likely to cause astronauts to abort future surface missions, says a planetary scientist who studies the phenomena.
Although such storms routinely engulf large swaths of the Red Planet for days at a time, any emergency serious enough to evacuate a crew isn’t likely to be triggered by a dust storm of the sort depicted in the forthcoming film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian.
“The idea of Sahara desert-like sandstorms where debris is being thrown around is a Hollywood representation of what Mars is like,” Jim Bell, a science team member for NASA ’s Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, told me. “We have no evidence that Mars is really like that.”
On Mars, Bell says, a fast-moving wind can only rarely make a sand grain move, but can easily pick up a dust grain.
The novel depicts such storms as much more destructive, however.
In the aftermath of a once in a century dust storm, the resourcefulness of the novel’s Mark Watney — the stranded NASA astronaut played by Matt Damon in the film, sometimes stretches credulity. Watney finds himself briefly knocked unconscious and injured by flying debris from the mission’s main surface antennas.
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