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can opportunity weather a gigantic dust

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storm on Mars mega storms roar across

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the Red Planet every five to six years

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Mariner 9 caught one in 1971 as did

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Viking five years later dust terms on

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Mars

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aren't the same as desc terms on earth

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if you're at the rover for instance

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sitting on the surface and you're

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looking up at the sky you're not going

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to see the sun's disk even during the

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day because the cloud the dust haze is

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thick enough that the sunlight has been

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either absorbed or scattered opportunity

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snapped these pictures over several

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Martian days recently darkened skies

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indicate the amount of dust blocking the

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sun's energy there is a possibility that

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if the dust haze continues to thicken

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and the solar power is reduced at the

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surface that we could lose the

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opportunity Rover there's a certain

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point where it doesn't have enough

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energy to maintain all of its systems

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and once they shut down we won't be able

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to revive them we're not at that point

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yet and we have some margin to that but

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we're close enough that we're a little

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worried about the rover team at NASA's

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a command

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asking opportunity to skip phoning home

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for a while to conserve energy

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Opportunity is hunkered down

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and so it's only doing the various such

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of things that are needed to keep the

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spacecraft to Mars winds can give it and

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taketh away

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Mars dust devils gave the rover's new

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leases on life by blowing the dust off

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their solar panels this windstorm is a

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different story

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dust storms on Mars aren't local the way

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they are on earth these things could

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take over the whole planet they can

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perhaps carry pulled the pole all the

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way wrapped around the planet the

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Odyssey spacecraft can see both were

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dust is in the atmosphere and our

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constancy of the temperature effect on

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the Mars Reconnaissance work there gets

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an almost complete global view of the

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planet scientists hope this Martian dust

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opportunity's twin spirit is on the

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other side of Mars where the dust storm

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is less severe the team is still

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limiting its activity to conserve power

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in the mean time scientists and

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engineers hope the dust settles soon

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before opportunity's power runs out the

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things don't get worse we expect that

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we'll be in a situation of recovering

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and being able to go on but even if we

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don't okay instead of 90 days we've

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gotten over a thousand days operation on