Environmental Hazards is the name of the class, however this title does not specify that we simply are interested in looking at Earth's environment so for my latest blog post I'm going to take us to Mars.
As we explore other planets and eventually send manned spacecraft there it's important to gain a better knowledge base of these potential planets, especially about their environments.
A mars rover landed early in August and has since been collecting data and exploring the planet. Recently it came under the influence of a major environmental hazard, a massive dust storm on the planets surface.
The dust storm was first noticed by NASA on November tenth and they have been following it ever since. Both Martian (the other one was landed in 2004) rovers have built in weather stations and they saw drops in air pressure as the storm moved across the region, they also experienced and increase in nighttime temperatures because the dust storm absorbs more sunlight than Martian typical planet surface. The warming effect can be felt 16 around the dust storm and that's what the rovers are experiencing currently.
We last saw dust storms this big in 2007 and prior to that in 2001. Dust storms like this pop up on Mars seasonally, and the Martian year is 2X as long as earth's year.
Scientists view this as a great opportunity to learn more about Martian Dust Storms. They see this as a time to examine the processes behind the Dust Storms and why some get so big-global scale, while others pop up and die off right away.
As we already know a lot (and yet not enough) about the environment that we currently live in, there is a new set of rules and circumstances we must think about as humans travel to new planets.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/24/mars-dust-storm-nasa-rovers-opportunity-curiosity_n_2184423.html#slide=more238062
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