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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New Delhi (PTI): Soon after the Centre notified the appointment of Gyanesh Kumar as the chief election commissioner on Monday, the Congress said the hastily-taken decision shows that the government is keen on circumventing the Supreme Court's scrutiny and getting the appointment done before a clear order kicks in.

Congress general secretary K C Venugopal said in a hasty midnight move, the government has notified the appointment of the new CEC.

"This goes against the spirit of our Constitution, and what has been reiterated by the Supreme Court in many cases -- for the electoral process to have sanctity, the CEC must be an impartial stakeholder," Venugopal said in a post on X.

The amended law dealing with the appointment of election commissioners has removed the chief justice of India (CJI) from the CEC selection panel and the government ought to have waited until the apex court's hearing in the matter on Wednesday (February 19) before selecting the officer, he said.

"Their decision to hastily hold the meeting today and appoint the new EC shows they are keen to circumvent the Supreme Court's scrutiny and get the appointment done before a clear order kicks in.

"Such egregious behaviour only confirms the doubts that many have expressed about how the ruling regime is destroying the electoral process and bending the rules for its benefit. Be it fake voter lists, schedules favouring the BJP, or concerns around EVM hacking -- the government and the CECs it appoints are subject to deep suspicion because of such incidents," Venugopal said.

He said as Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had rightly pointed out, the decision should have been kept aside until the apex court decided the issue in line with the Constitution.