dust

Like painted kites, those days and nights
went flyin' by
The world was new, beneath a blue
umbrella sky

Then softer than a piper man,
one day it called to you
And I lost you, I lost you to
the summer wind...

NASA engineers are hoping those words, famously crooned by Frank Sinatra, don't come true this summer for the unflappable Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Summer is approaching on Mars, and with it comes the onset of huge wind storms that kick dust around the twin Mars Exploration Rovers and their life-giving solar panels.

"We believe we have the Holy Grail," says Don Brownlee, the lead scientist for NASA's Stardust mission, in which a robotic spacecraft traveled nearly three billion miles to capture interstellar dust and comet particles and then flew back to Earth in a seven-year round-trip voyage. The touch-down this January in the Utah desert marked the first successful return of extraterrestrial material since 1976, when an unmanned Soviet probe last brought home moon rocks.