For the second time in its career, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is hunkering down on the Red Planet and foregoing scientific operations as a dust storm whirls around the intrepid little rover. Opportunity weathered – with some difficulty – a massive, global dust storm in 2007, remarkably surviving despite extremely low power levels generated by its solar panels during the event. NASA announced last night that the current dust storm is now worse – in terms of total sunlight blocked – than the 2007 storm.
