Mars 3 arrives to a dust-shrouded planet

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Mars 3 arrives to a dust-shrouded planet

When the Russian orbiter Mars 3 arrived at Mars late in 1971, it found the surface of the planet to be almost completely obscured by an enormous global dust event. Several months later, the sky was finally clear enough to reveal surface features. The image on the left was captured on December 12, 1971, and the one on the right on February 28, 1972.

Russian Academy of Sciences / Ted Stryk

Copyright holder: Ted Stryk

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about February 28, 1972