There are more submitted images that have been posted here that show the current dust storm to be growing. It has now expanded southward to cover the south polar cap and northwest to obscure parts of Tyrrhenum and Cimmarium.

It's hard to say how this is going to affect the Rovers at this point. Meridiani, where Opportunity is poised to descend into Victoria Crater, is not visible to USA based observers—here's hoping our eastern hemisphere contributors have clear skies!

The storm is starting to close in on Spirit; if it does get there it will obscure the sunlight that is used to run and recharge the battery packs of the rover.

So I'm checking out the Astronomy Picture of the Day (as I do every morning) and see this wonderful shot by Opportunity, one of the Mars Exploration Rovers. I thought this picture was stunning—it reminded me, somewhat, of the formations in Utah I'd visited back in 2005 right before the AAPT summer meeting (American Association of Physics Teachers). Although, the sky is just a bit too orange…

The original MER catalog image tells us that it's Cape St. Vincent, one of the many promontories at the rim of Victoria Crater. The bright band of rock just a short way down the wall marks the boundary between a relatively loose jumble of rock and older bedrock—it was the "original" surface of Mars here before the impact. There's even a nice false color image that was made to better show the transition. Now that looks more like Utah!

Opportunity has been spending some quite some time exploring the rim of Victoria Crater, a half-mile (800 m) wide impact feature. In fact, for the past 264 Sols (that's a martian day, which is about 30 minutes longer than a terrestrial day) it has traversed about a quarter of the way around, then come back. The reason: it was (in part) looking for a safe way down! That's right, the Rover team is going to send Opportunity down into Victoria crater.

The main reason for going down is that "down" equals "back in time" so the deeper it goes, the older the rocks that it will be able to investigate. This will help fill in the picture of what Mars was like (at least in this area) through time and what the water availability was at those older times. This is some exciting geology! (Hmmm—I suppose that ought to be aereology , yes?)

To get an idea of just what the rover is up against in its attempt to travel down into the crater, you can check out these 3-d images of the area it took. Since the rover cameras are about five feet above the ground, the depth perception you get from these images is about the same as you'd get if you were really standing there. You can also check out this flyover movie created by the US Geological Survey using MGS MOC images of the crater. And if you're looking for something truly spectacular, you can take a look at my favorite Victoria Crater image.

I got in today do review new image submissions and there was another image by Jim Melka showing dust spreading, now starting across Syrtis Major.

There was also a dust alert put out by Richard McKim, Director of the British Astronomical Association Mars section:

Dear Mars Observer

On 2007 June 25 Jim Melka (USA) informed me about a dust storm spreading west from the northern Hellas basin across Noachis. The storm over Noachis was bright yellow, and in extent is typical of one already a few days old.

Images by Ed Lomeli (USA) on June 26 showed the event to have cut across Hellespontus in two places, and to have progressed as least as far as Argyre. As of June 27 the storm also now cut across Sinus Sabaeus in Lomeli's images, spilling into Aeria-Arabia, whilst Melka's image of yesterday shows that all of Hellas is full of dust, the original core being in the NW corner, and that activity is further developing or spilling over Ausonia-Hesperia to the east.

Both the timescale and nature of this development are entirely typical for Hellas events, and the seasonal date is also normal.

Any further observations of this event - which has now become Regional in status - are requested.

2007 June 28

No word yet on what sort of images of this storm have been made by any of the current suite of orbiters, but as soon as I hear anything, I'll post it here.

Mars observer Jim Melka has submitted an image from 25 June that shows a dust storm in the Noachis region that is occluding it and Mare Serpentis (these regions are just west of Hellas Basin). You can see that images by clicking on the Images link and setting the your search values for June 25; or you can follow this direct link.

In the image, the south pole is at top and going straight down (north) from there you will see the round, orange, Hellas basin to the left (East) and another rounded orange spot down and to the right (northwest) of that—that's where the dark region Mare Serpentis ought to be. The dark area extending down and to the left (northeast) is, of course, Syrtis Major. The bluish-white band at the extreme north is, as Jim notes in his description, the North Polar Hood, a large cloud of ice that covers the northern polar cap.

This region is well known for its dust storm activity. Back when the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) was in its aerobraking phase, it imaged a dust storm in this region on 26 November 1997. It had started earlier, and by this point had expanded to quite the regional storm. By early December it had ended. Mars was too small too far away from Earth to be imaged well telescopically.

In 2001, storms from this area whirled out and around Hellas Basin beginning in June and then turned into a global storm by early July. The dust loading in the atmosphere was measured by the MGS Thermal Emissions Spectrometer (TES). Since this was all happening shortly before the 2001 opposition, many folks from the IMW community were on top of it. You can see all the MarsWatch images from June and July that were submitted. Note: those pages are huge since they contain a full month of images—it was written before I had the idea of making sub-pages and I have not gone back to "fix" it.

And again, in 2003, there were dust storms in Noachis. They were imaged by the MGS Mars Orbiter Camera on 14 August and 24 October. Once again, the MarsWatch regulars were monitoring it throughout the observing season. You can see their corresponding 13–16 August and October images for comparison. Note that due to the rotation of Mars, the areas viewed by MGS-MOC are not always facing Earth when ground-based observers can take their images.

Finally, the MGS-TES team has compiled all their dust activity data into one big (35 MB) movie running from 9 April 1999 all the way to 31 August 2004.

So now that we have a dust storm kicking around, we can only wait and see what comes of it. Clear skies!

I realize this is a bit old, but I ran across it again and realized that I'd never put in a link to it on any MarsWatch links pages—something I'll be fixing soon.

So it seems that Google decided to put is powerful maps interface to work on various Mars data sets. If you go to www.google.com/mars you'll see their standard map interface with the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MGS-MOLA) elevation map. You can double-click on any region to center it, zoom in, zoom out, etc. It works just like their regular map interface, although no streets view or traffic reports.

Aside from the elevation view, you can choose the visible or infrared views instead. The visible map is made from a mosaic of images taken with the MGS Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). The zoom capability here is great! Just check out this view of the Olympus Mons caldera or this area of Candor Chasma. Really nice stuff.

The infrared view comes from the Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS). While it is mostly a greyscale image (bright = more IR emission, dark = less IR emission) the brown areas are places where they have added some very high resolution mosaics.

To help you with your exploring, there are links that will highlight various features, spacecraft landing sites, and even NASA stories. About the only thing to be careful about is that when you are hand scrolling around, or you zoom out "too far", you see that the map is repeated several times—so, no, there really are not 4 Hellas Basins on Mars.

Check it out and have fun doing your own "roving" on Mars!

P.S. If you're interested, there's also a Google Moon.