Dust storms on Mars are a large-scale and complex phenomenon. They generate powerful electrical discharges in the atmosphere. Recently, scientists analyzed just how dangerous they could be for future missions.
Can dust storms generate electrical discharges?
A new study by a doctoral student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), part of the University of Alabama system, shows that global dust storms on Mars may organize the Martian atmosphere into regions conducive to electrical activity, increasing the likelihood of electrostatic discharges that could affect missions on the Red Planet by interfering with electronics, causing arcing between conductive surfaces, and damaging exposed scientific instruments and spacecraft systems. The study was conducted by Chali Idosa Uga, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Space Sciences at UAH.
According to the website phys.org, the study focuses on the global dust storm of the 34th Martian year—an event that engulfed the entire planet and occurred on Mars in 2018. This is one of the best-studied Martian weather events, as it was observed simultaneously by several orbital stations and rovers. Uga’s research focused on whether such events can create conditions under which electric fields can build up to levels conducive to electrical discharges in localized regions of the lower atmosphere.
“Mars doesn’t have thunderstorms in the Earthly sense, but it does experience intense dust storms in its thin carbon dioxide atmosphere,” explains Uga. “During such events, dust is lifted, transported, and mixed in the lower layers of the atmosphere, creating conditions under which collisions between individual dust grains can generate an electric charge, and the poorly conductive atmosphere can allow this charge to persist.”
Electrified Dust as a Threat to Missions
The study also highlights the potential implications for future missions to Mars, which may need to account for the electrostatic environment during dust storms.
For future Mars missions, Uga’s study proposes evaluating large dust storms not only as atmospheric, thermal, and visibility hazards, but also as structured electrostatic environments. In this context, the risks are assessed not for a specific spacecraft, settlement, instrument, or communication system. The study demonstrates that during a global dust storm on Mars in the 34th Martian year, the lower atmosphere developed localized, altitude-dependent regions where charge separation could persist, and the simulated electric fields approached conditions conducive to breakdown.
“Conditions conducive to a breakdown” means that the electric field in the atmosphere has become strong enough to approach the point at which an electrical discharge (such as a spark or lightning) could occur. Uga emphasizes that the study did not aim to claim that lightning had been detected on Mars, but rather to understand the physical conditions that could allow electrical processes to occur.
Electrostatic effects and their impact on the surface of Mars
The study has implications for how scientists think about the chemistry of Mars and the possibility of life there. “If electrical discharges occur in such regions, they could alter the local reaction environment in Mars’s dusty atmosphere, which consists of carbon dioxide,” says Uga. “This is important because the chemical state of the near-surface atmosphere influences how we interpret oxidants, perchlorate-related chemistry, and the preservation of organic molecules—all of which are key factors in assessing habitability.”
Uga added that electrostatic effects can influence how dust interacts with spacecraft systems and instruments. “This finding is important for surface operations, because an electrostatic charge can alter how dust interacts with the mission’s open systems. During severe dust storms, charged dust can act not only as mechanical contamination but also as part of the electrical environment near the surface, affecting dust adhesion to materials, dust deposition on sensitive surfaces, instrument stability, and charge accumulation.”
From Models to Tests on Mars
This month, Uga’s findings were recognized at the 2026 National Science Foundation conference on “Coupling, Energy, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions” (CEDAR) in Des Moines, Iowa—an event that brings together researchers studying Earth’s upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, the thermosphere, and their interactions with space weather.
Looking ahead, Uga says the next step will be to combine simulated predictions with laboratory experiments and future observations of Mars.
“The next step in this research is to move beyond determining where dust storms on Mars create favorable electrical conditions to verifying whether these conditions actually produce measurable electrical effects in the real atmosphere. Our study provides a physical framework that links dust content, atmospheric structure, turbulence, conductivity, charge distribution, and breakdown susceptibility during a global dust storm,” says the researcher.
The next step is to validate this structure through laboratory experiments, improved modeling of atmospheric electricity, and future observations from missions that will be able to verify whether the electrically favorable regions predicted by the model correspond to the detected signals.
