NASA's Curiosity rover captures images of Martian dust storm
Washington, June 21 : With NASA engineers yet to make contact with the Opportunity Mars rover due to a massive storm on the Red Planet, scientists are pinning their hopes on learning more about Martian dust storms from images captured by the Curiosity probe.
As of Tuesday morning, the Martian dust storm had grown in size and was officially a "planet-encircling" (or "global") dust event, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.
Though Curiosity is on the other side of Mars from Opportunity, dust has steadily increased over it, more than doubling over the weekend, NASA said.
The US space agency said the Curiosity Rover this month used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to snap photos of the intensifying haziness of the surface of Mars caused by the massive dust storm.
For NASA's human scientists watching from the ground, Curiosity offers an unprecedented window to answer some questions. One of the biggest: Why do some Martian dust storms last for months and grow massive, while others stay small and last only a week?
"We don't have any good idea," said Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Curiosity, he pointed out, plus a fleet of spacecraft in the orbit of Mars, will allow scientists for the first time to collect a wealth of dust information both from the surface and from space.
The last storm of global magnitude that enveloped Mars was in 2007, five years before Curiosity landed there.
The current storm has starkly increased dust at Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover is studying the storm's effects from the surface.
But it poses little risk to the Curiosity rover, said Curiosity's engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
However, there was still no signal from the Opportunity rover, although a recent analysis of the rover's long-term survivability in Mars' extreme cold suggests Opportunity's electronics and batteries can stay warm enough to function.
Regardless, the project does not expect to hear from Opportunity until the skies begin to clear over the rover.
The dust storm is comparable in scale to a similar storm observed by Viking I in 1977, but not as big as the 2007 storm that Opportunity previously weathered.
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Cong cites Kangana's purported remarks to accuse BJP of wanting to bring back repealed farm laws
New Delhi, Sep 24: The Congress on Tuesday cited BJP MP Kangana Ranaut's purported remarks on farm laws to allege that the ruling party was making efforts to bring back the three laws that were repealed in 2021, and asserted that Haryana will give a befitting reply to it.
The Congress shared on X an undated video of Ranaut in which she is purportedly saying in Hindi, "Farm laws that have been repealed should be brought back. I think this may get controversial. The laws in farmers' interest be brought back. Farmers should themselves demand this (to bring farm laws back) so that there is no hindrance to their prosperity.
"Farmers are a pillar of strength in India's progress. Only in some states, they had objected to farm laws. I appeal with folded hands that farm laws should be brought back in the interest of farmers."
In a post in Hindi along with the video, the Congress said, "The three black laws imposed on farmers should be brought back: BJP MP Kangana Ranaut has said this. More than 750 farmers of the country were martyred, only then did the Modi government wake up and these black laws were withdrawn."
Now BJP MPs are planning to bring back these laws, the Congress alleged.
"The Congress is with the farmers. These black laws will never return, no matter how hard Narendra Modi and his MPs try," the opposition party said on X.
Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate also shared the video of Ranaut on X and said, "'All three farm laws should be brought back': BJP MP Kangana Ranaut. More than 750 farmers were martyred while protesting against the three black farmer laws. Efforts are being made to bring them back."
"We will never let that happen. Haryana will answer first," she said in an apparent reference to the assembly polls in Haryana.
Congress' media and publicity department head Pawan Khera also shared the video on X and said it was the BJP's "real thinking".
"How many times will you deceive the farmers, you two-faced people?" Khera said in a post in Hindi.
The three laws -- Farmer's Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act; The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act; and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act -- were repealed in November 2021.
The farmers' protest started at the fag-end of November 2020 and ended after Parliament repealed the three laws. The legislations came into force in June 2020 and were repealed in November 2021.
“तीनों किसान क़ानून वापस लाये जाने चाहिए” : BJP MP कंगना रनौत
— Supriya Shrinate (@SupriyaShrinate) September 24, 2024
जिन तीन काले किसान विरोधी क़ानूनों की मुख़ालिफ़त करते 750 से ज़्यादा किसान शहीद हो गए
उनको दोबारा से लाने की कोशिश की जा रही है. हम ऐसा कभी नहीं होने देंगे
सबसे पहला जवाब हरियाणा देगा pic.twitter.com/kRAkRuE2cc
