That possible impact of an asteroid on Mars at the end of January would be quite a show for the orbiters and rovers now on duty at the red planet.

I asked Steve Squyres - lead scientist of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers at Cornell — what he thought might be observable by the robots - at that time, in their fourth year of operations.

“If an impact takes place, the most likely thing for us to observe would be dust that has been lofted into the atmosphere by the impact event and then carried over the rover sites by wind,” Squyres said. “So if there is an impact, we’ll increase our monitoring of dust in the atmosphere to see if we can observe any effects.”

Squyres added that the rover team, of course, would try to image the sky at the predicted time of impact to see if anything can be seen, “but that’s got to be considered a very improbable long shot.”

Scientists say that the asteroid that might hit Mars — 2007 WD5 that was spotted late November — is similar in size to the Tunguska impactor that struck Siberia a century ago.

Recently, experts at Sandia National Laboratories ran some supercomputer simulations suggesting that the Tunguska asteroid hit here on Earth a century ago may have been much smaller than previously thought. One message from their study suggests that smaller objects can create quite a mess given the stunning amount of devastation at Tunguska.

So…should be quite a dust-up on Mars if 2007 WD5 pings the red planet next month.