Mars Rovers and Orbiters Lose Contact with Earth During Solar Conjunction
Robotic explorers investigating Mars are currently out of touch with space agencies on Earth after hitting a giant communications roadblock. NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the location where it will be parked during Mars solar conjunction.
Mission controllers at NASA won’t send any commands to its fleet of orbiters and rovers, including Perseverance and Curiosity, for the next 10 days due to the Mars solar conjunction. The phenomenon occurs every two years when Mars and Earth are unfavorably positioned on opposite sides of the sun as they travel along their individual orbits.
During the roughly two-week period, the hot, energized gas continually spewed by the sun from its outer atmosphere can interfere with the radio signals that NASA uses to communicate with its Martian robotic explorers. If engineers attempt to send commands to any of the Martian spacecraft during this time, the messages may get mixed up — and that gamble isn’t worth the risk of rovers or orbiters receiving corrupted communication that could endanger them.
A planned communications drop started Saturday and is in place until November 25. For a couple of those days, mission controllers expect a complete blackout. However, they expect to receive regular health updates from the various spacecraft.
The slowdown is a nice break for the people who devote their time to working on Mars missions, but it doesn’t mean the work completely stops. The robotic fleet will still operate — albeit without the close supervision they usually receive.
“Our mission teams have spent months preparing to-do lists for all our Mars spacecraft,” said Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “We’ll still be able to hear from them and check their states of health over the next few weeks.”
Both rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, received the lengthy lists of commands prior to the communications blackout that will keep them busy, including tasks such as tracking changes in the Martian weather, surface conditions and radiation. Perseverance will take the opportunity to survey surrounding rocks and use its cameras to spot clouds and dust devils, while the Ingenuity helicopter, which has largely served as the Perseverance rover’s aerial scout, will also lie low and won’t conduct any flights during this time.
Once the conjunction period is over, the robotic fleet will share the collected data, and the Mars missions and their teams will resume their normal cadence of exploring the red planet.