Mars missions are slowing down over the next few weeks, thanks to a solar conjunction. The conjunction happens when Mars and the Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun.
Thanks to the solar conjunction, the Mars rovers and reconnaissance orbiter will enjoy their own version of a spring break. The sun will block the line of sight between the two planets for most of April.
Because of the celestial alignment , mission engineers will have problems sending instructions and hearing responses from the rovers and orbiter. To prevent any potential communication issues, engineers have already set the rovers to do short task lists while they wait for the communications blackout to end.
This means that, instead of zapping rocks with lasers, drilling, and driving around the Red Planet, the Mars Curiosity rover will spend the next month checking the weather once an hour, measuring radiation, and looking for signs of water below the planet’s surface.
Opportunity, Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the ESA’s Mars Express have already been through a solar conjunction before. But it will be the first for the six-wheeled Curiosity, which dramatically touched down inside the Gale Crater last August.
Curiosity’s handlers won’t send any commands to the SUV-sized robot between April 4 and May 1. NASA officials wrote about the upcoming conjunction during the latest Curiosity rover mission update, saying, “The [communications] moratorium is a precaution against possible interference by the sun corrupting a command sent to the rover.”
Along with giving the rovers a short break, some of the mission’s team members will also get the opportunity to take a short break. A video by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California even suggested that some members could take to the beach in the coming weeks.
The MRO and Mars Odyssey are tasked with relaying information from Opportunity and Curiosity back to Earth. While the MRO went into a record-only mode on Thursday, the Odyssey will continue to send information home during the solar conjunction. The even happens about every 26 months. So far, Odyssey has weathered five conjunctions, while Opportunity has gone through four.
Once the solar conjunction is over, the Mars Curiosity rover will resume its mission to find the building blocks of life on Mars.
[Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech ]