Arizona Dust Devils Targeted for Mars Experiment

(EDITORS: Note directions to field site and cell phone contact numbers at the end of this story.)

A University of Arizona-led international team of 20 space scientists and engineers this week are conducting an ambitious field test of equipment to study dust devils swirling over the Santa Cruz flats near Eloy, Ariz.

The "Matador" experiment, led by Peter Smith of the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and funded by NASA's Human Exploration and Development of Space enterprise, will help define instruments needed for studying much larger dust devils on Mars later in this decade, possibly in 2007.

Mars dust is a major potential threat to both robotic and human exploration of the Red Planet. Enormous martian dust devils - 100 times larger than those on Earth -- churning tons of electrically charged dust particles could cause lightning bolts and discharges that might fry computers and delicate electronics, interfere with radio communications, or rip apart pressurized human habitat.

Earth dust devils can be 10 meters to 20 meters in diameter and 1,000 meters (a kilometer or six-tenths of a mile) high, Smith said. Mars dust devils are typically a kilometer in diameter and 10 kilometers (6 miles) high. Martian dust devils are so big that they dust the planet's atmosphere, giving the atmosphere its reddish-brown hue, and so big that Mars Global Surveyor cameras have photographed them from orbit.

Smith, whose Imager for Mars Pathfinder camera returned a trove of famous photos from the surface of Mars where it landed July 4, 1997, was among a group of scientists who recently briefed the National Research Council on hazards to humans on Mars. He also is co-investigator for Beagle 2, the lander part of the 2003 "Mars Express" mission, Europe's first mission to the Red Planet.

"We are going to get experience in measuring the physical and electrical properties of dust devils," Smith said. "We want practice tracking dust devils with LIDAR. And we may find that we'll need to make measurements that we haven't thought about yet."

Starting today (June 4), the Matador team will conduct daily operations near plowed but uncultivated agricultural fields in desert near Eloy. Using LIDAR at their fixed station, researchers will track speed and direction of the moving dust storms, then drive their instrument-laden pickup "mobile station" into the paths of any dust devils they can intercept. Video crews in another vehicle and at the fixed station will record dust devils as they hit the instruments deployed from the pickup.

LIDAR, which bounces a laser beam to measure distance to the dust storm, will be used to track moving dust devils and get density profiles of dust in the twisters. The suite of instruments for the field test also includes cameras, a laser doppler anemometer for gauging wind speed, temperature and pressure sensors, magnets, high frequency and low frequency radios and electric field antennae, a dust counter, an "electric field mill" made by Global Atmospherics of Tucson (it measures changes in Earth's electric field that averages around 100 volts per meter but shoots up to 2,000 or 3,000 volts per meter, e.g, during lightning strikes), and MAOS, the Mars Atmospheric Oxidant Sensor, a chemistry experiment to discover the source of oxidation (corrosion) on Mars. Portable GPS units are attached to the scientists' rugged field laptop computers.

Team scientists include Smith and others from the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab; John Marshall of NASA Ames Research Center, an expert on dust properties; William Farrell of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an expert on the electrical properties of dust devils; Greg DeLory of the University of California-Berkeley, who is managing the data system during the experiment; Allan Carswell of Optech, Ontario, Canada, who will operate the LIDAR; Barry Hillard of the NASA John Glenn Research Center, who will be using the electric field mill; Nilton Renno of the UA departments of atmospheric sciences and planetary sciences, an expert on Earth's dust devils, and others.

FIELD SITE: At 10 a.m. tomorrow, Tuesday (June 5), the team will leave the UA campus from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory loading dock, east of Flandrau Science Center, drive I-10 to Eloy, turn south on Sunshine Boulevard and drive 5 miles to a place noted as Friendly Corners on detailed maps. There they'll set up a tent to shade LIDAR and other fixed station operations.

CELL PHONE CONTACT:
Lori Stiles, UA News Services, 520-360-0574
Nilton Renno, 520-465-2594
Peter Smith, 520-661-8040

**UA News Services, 520-621-1877, web site @http://uanews.org**