Riders on the Storm: NASA InSight Lander and the 2018 Mars Global Dust Storm

On May 5, 2018, NASA's InSight spacecraft, carrying an international scientific payload with which to explore the interior of Mars, launched from Vandenburg AFB, California, and began its six-and-a-half-month voyage to Mars. Four weeks later, on June 3, 2018, a powerful regional Martian dust storm surged through Meridiani Planum and within days had left the 14-year-old Opportunity rover in darkness and generating insufficient solar power to operate. On June 10, Opportunity sent signals including information that the optical depth (“tau”) of the thick dust blanketing the atmosphere was an all-time high ever measured from the Martian surface, at a value of 10.8. Then Opportunity soon afterwards experienced a power fault and ceased communicating with her ground controllers. By June 20, the storm had spread across the entire planet Mars, darkening the skies at Gale Crater where the Curiosity Rover had been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, on the opposite side of Mars from Opportunity. Record-setting, high atmospheric dust levels continued to be measured and reported by the Curiosity team, as the storm became global. Among those keeping daily tabs on the enormous storm that swiftly enshrouded the Red Planet were the InSight flight team of engineers and scientists, whose recently-launched spacecraft was functioning quite well in flight and now five and a half months away from an unchangeable landing date at Mars - November 26, 2018. As our spacecraft hurtled through interplanetary space towards its destination, the InSight team took stock of the situation. Would this enormous dust storm still be raging when InSight arrived? What, if anything, had this storm changed in the assumptions made by InSight's design and test engineers about Martian atmospheric conditions for descending to the surface, or generating power there? Would InSight survive and carry out her mission?