This animation illustrates Mars solar conjunction, a period when Mars is on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. During this time, the Sun can interrupt radio transmissions to spacecraft on and around the Red Planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
All of NASA’s spacecraft on Mars are about to find themselves on their own, running simplified routines and cut off from their masters on Earth. That’s because something big is about to come between the two planets — an electromagnetic energy source that’s too powerful to broadcast through or around: the sun.
During this period, known as the Mars solar conjunction, our home star and its corona pass between Earth and the Red Planet. Some radio signals might still get through, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but they aren’t reliable. Fortunately for all those distant robots, NASA knows this happens every couple years, and the machines are well prepared for the coming quiet period.
“Our engineers have been preparing our spacecraft for conjunction for months,” Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Relay Network, said in the statement. “They’ll still be collecting science data at Mars, and some will attempt to send that data home. But we won’t be commanding the spacecraft out of concern that they could act on a corrupted command.”
