Driving in the storm

Mars is a planetary desert. Living and exploring it will be a challenge in many ways, for both humans and vehicles. Here is a new photo-montage of a big pressurized rover riding dunes during a dust storm. Such vehicle -that would carry an entire crew of scientists- will have to be perfectly designed to face many kinds of terrains and keep humans from the deadly atmosphere, in particular from the very fine and tricky dust of Mars, one of the toughest issues for missions out there. Just as Kim Stanley Robinson describes in Red Mars, the planet sometimes gets covered by dust storms that can last several martian years. Then imagine how many drives like the one above settlers would have to do. In such conditions, geolocation help from satellites will be a question of survival. But well, maybe the choice would be to move as few as possible during those storms, even if it lasts years...

The rover is a 3D model made with Sketchup, and the photo-montage is made with TheGimp on Linux-Ubuntu.