A truck carrying a few space junkies and a handful of grit-encrusted instruments lumbers across a hot, dry plateau. The wind picks up and a massive dust cloud looms in the distance. The size and severity of the ephemeral event is quickly measured, and the truck guns straight into the face of the dirt storm.
It might not be a human science colony at Mars, but it certainly feels like it.
That is why an international team of 20 scientists and engineers are field testing equipment in the Arizona desert this week in what is being called the Matador experiment. Instruments are being fine tuned to eventually track and give early warning of the enormous dust devils that dictate the weather at the surface of Mars.
Even though Martian dust storms can be 100 times larger than those on Earth, the scientists, led by the University of Arizona's Peter Smith, hope to learn as much as possible at the Santa Cruz flats before similar instruments face the real thing on Mars as soon as 2007.
The dust storms there can be 6 miles (10 kilometers) high and two thirds of a mile (a kilometer) wide: big enough to be seen by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor currently orbiting the Red Planet. The Martian wind is so dust laden that the atmosphere itself is rust-colored.
The dust storms present a major problem for robotic and human exploration of our closest celestial neighbor. The enormous size of the dust devils on Mars create such a whirl of highly charged particles that they throw out lightning and other huge electrical discharges. Delicate electronics and radio communications could easily be destroyed.
"If these things are as violent as they look, they could pose quit a hazard to a human colony. Thats something you want to know about in advance," Smith said.
Smith was one of several scientists who recently briefed the National Research Council on the hazards to human exploration on Mars and said storms are the planet's greatest hazard.
So his team is conducting research that could save future lives with daily experiments near plowed but uncultivated land. Using LIDAR, a mixed-bag instrumentation of laser and radar, the scientists sniff out the speed, direction and density of a developing storm and take measurements a la "Twister" once they arrive at the eye of the storm and turn off the truck's engine.
The truck -- a mobile weather station -- is equipped with cameras, a laser doppler anemometer for gauging wind speed, thermometers and barometers, magnets, high- and low-frequency radios and electric field antennae.
Along with that comes a dust counter, an instrument that measures changes in Earths electric field, GPS devices, and a Mars Atmospheric Oxidant Sensor which is a chemistry experiment designed to measure corrosion on Mars.
The physical properties of dust devils on Earth and Mars are not well understood, Smith said.
Whatever is learned in Arizona in terms of tracking and explaining the storms will be used to invent instruments that actually go to Mars and face its dust storms in earnest.
"Well have to redesign for Mars," said Smith, "but what were learning is brand new stuff."
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