Mars is obscured by the sun's disk, preventing NASA from communicating with rovers and spacecraft orbiting the red planet.
The Perseverance robot will continue to collect samples to send back to Earth after the signal loss period. Photo: NASA
The rovers and spacecraft orbiting Mars have been out of communication for several weeks as Earth has been unable to communicate with the red planet. That’s because Mars has moved behind the sun, disrupting communications between the vehicles and NASA on Earth. The communications outage will last from November 11 to 25, NASA said. NASA will continue to receive brief status updates from the rovers during that time, except for two days when Mars completely passes behind the sun, resulting in a complete loss of communication with the rovers.
When Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, an event called a solar conjunction occurs every two years due to the difference in orbital speeds of the two planets. Mars takes 687 Earth days to complete its orbit around the Sun. During that time, Mars is at its farthest point from Earth (about 402 million kilometers), much farther than its closest point (54.6 million kilometers).
When Mars is too close to the Sun (as seen from Earth’s sky), radio signals traveling between the two planets can travel through the corona, the extremely hot layer of ionized gas on the outermost layer of the Sun. This can disrupt and scramble signals from Earth to and from the Mars rover, leading to lost data and strange behavior that could endanger the rover.
The last time a similar event occurred was from October 2 to 16, 2021 and August 28 to September 7, 2019. "Our engineers have been preparing for the conjunction for months. The spacecraft will still be collecting science data at Mars, and some vehicles will be trying to transmit data back to Earth," said Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Communications Network at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
But the rovers and orbiters will not stop working, but will continue to collect data to transmit later, operating in autonomous mode. NASA mission control teams spent months preparing to-do lists for all the vehicles.
The Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will stay in place, but continue to monitor changes in Martian surface conditions, weather, and radiation, while the Ingenuity helicopter will use its color camera to study shifting sand. In orbit, the Mars Reconnaissance and Odyssey rovers will take pictures of the Martian surface, while the MAVEN rover will collect data on how the planet’s atmosphere interacts with the Sun.
An Khang (According to Newsweek )
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