As an intense dust storm rages on Mars , many are wondering — how bad can a Martian storm really be? Tuesday (June 12), NASA's Opportunity rover stopped communications amid a severe dust storm ...

Winds in dust storms on Mars can reach up to 60 mph, less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds on Earth, according to NASA. CU Boulder professor Paul Hayne said dust storms are a long ...

Mars is now blurred when seen from above by a massive storm of fine dust particles turning day to night on much of the planet's surface. The storm was first spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance ...

Mars, before and after haze from a global dust storm in 2001 obscured its surface. Images taken one month apart, by the Mars Orbiter Camera onboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor.

Scientists involved in the Viking missions that landed on Mars in the 1970s first proposed that dust storms might be a source of the new reactive chemistry on the red planet.

Global dust storms have happened a few times since NASA started observing Mars. One famous example was a 1971 dust storm that raged as Mariner 9 orbited the planet.

"Mars will reach the midpoint of its current dust storm season on October 29th of this year," James Shirley, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement.

The dust storm is the biggest on Mars since 2007. Martian dust storms are common, especially during the planet's Southern Hemisphere spring and summer, when it is closest to the sun, NASA said.

This series of simulated Mars rover Opportunity images shows how conditions have changed around the NASA rover as a huge dust storm has intensified (from left to right) throughout June 2018.