NASA will no
longer send commands to the Mars fleet due to Mars solar conjunction
. Because the sun is between Earth and Mars, NASA has stopped sending commands
to robotic probes in or on Mars orbit.
From the Curiosity and Perseverance spacecraft to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA has a veritable robot army on or in orbit
around Mars. But the space agency announced Thursday that it will not send
commands to those probes until Saturday, Nov. 25, because of the positions of
Mars, Earth and the sun.
From November 11th to 25th, the Sun will be between Earth and Mars. This
phenomenon is called the conjunction of Mars and the Sun, and it occurs every
two years. Space agencies are cutting off communications because the sun is
spewing hot ionized gases from its corona that could corrupt radio signals sent
from Earth to Mars. This could lead to unexpected behavior of the rover on
Mars.
Of course, this does not mean that robot missions will stop. The Perseverance
and Curiosity rovers will continue to monitor changes in surface conditions,
weather, and radiation even when they are not moving. The Ingenuity helicopter
will be on the ground and will use color cameras to examine the movement of the
sand. The Mars Reconnaissance and Odyssey orbiters will continue to image the
planet`s surface while in orbit. Also, while NASA won`t be sending commands to
the spacecraft, it will continue receiving health updates from all of them
throughout the conjunction apart from two days. There will be two days when the
space agency will not get updates from the spacecraft because Mars will be
completely behind the disk of the Sun. But once the communications pause ends,
all the pending science data collected by the missions will be relayed back to
the planet where scientists can continue studying it.
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