NASA puts its Mars missions on time out for two weeks in October due to solar conjunction

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will halt all its robotic Mars exploration efforts in October. There will be a communications blackout this month that may disrupt interplanetary communications.

The blackout will be caused by solar conjunction — a period when the Earth and Mars will be invisible to each other due to the planets being on opposite sides of the Sun. According to NASA, the event occurs every two years for about two weeks.

Front and center is the flight spare for the first Mars rover, Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. On the left is a Mars Exploration Rover Project test rover that is a working sibling to Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004. On the right is a Mars Science Laboratory test rover the size of that project's Mars rover, Curiosity, which is on course for landing on Mars in August 2012. Missing in frame is Perseverance rover. Image credit: NASA

This year, the solar conjunction moratorium is between 2 October and 14 October, when Mars is within 2 degrees of the Sun.

NASA will task its missions with homework during the “short vacation” as all spacecrafts will go “virtually incommunicado” during the period.

The agency’s Perseverance rover will perform weather measurement and radar experiments. The rover, which landed in February, will also look for any dust devils passing by on the planet as well as listen for environmental sounds using its microphone. The official account of the rover tweeted that it has found a parking spot to wait out the blackout period.

The Curiosity rover will also perform the same functions. The rover has been working on Mars since 2012 and has not faced any major issues in the previous solar conjunctions.

NASA's three long-running orbiters — Mars Atmosphere and Volatiles Evolution Mission (MAVEN), Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — will send back status updates from the surface missions on the planet. The orbiters, which have also faced solar conjunctions in the past, will perform scientific observations to send back to Earth after the period is over.

The InSight lander will run a passive experiment, keeping its seismometer operational to keep track of big marsquakes.

The Ingenuity Mars helicopter will wait out the blackout duration, staying parked 175 metres away from the Perseverance rover. The helicopter will continue to send weekly updates to the rover.

According to the space agency, no one attempts to send any instructions for the missions during the solar conjunction as it is impossible to predict how the charged particles of the Sun can interfere with the information being relayed.

Once the solar conjunction is over, engineers will use NASA’s Deep Space Network to download the data collected during the period. Once this process is complete, normal spacecraft operations will resume.

The solar conjunction will also affect other missions at the Red Planet from China, India, and Europe. However, the space agencies have not detailed their plans for the blackout period.



from Firstpost Tech Latest News https://ift.tt/3kYIiO6

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elon Musk’s bid spotlights Twitter’s unique role in public discourse – and what changes might be in store

Twitter has been in the news a lot lately, albeit for the wrong reasons. Its stock growth has languished and the platform itself has largely remained the same since its founding in 2006. On April 14, 2022, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, made an offer to buy Twitter and take the public company private. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission , Musk stated, “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.” As a researcher of social media platforms , I find that Musk’s potential ownership of Twitter and his stated reasons for buying the company raise important issues. Those issues stem from the nature of the social media platform and what sets it apart from others. What makes Twitter unique Twitter occupies a unique niche. Its short chunks of text and threading foster real-time conversations among thousands of people, which
Read more

To reach net-zero emissions and remove CO2 from the air, scientists drawn up six priorities

Image
To reach net-zero emissions by 2050, global emissions must be cut faster and deeper than the world has yet managed. But even then, some hard-to-treat sources of pollution – in aviation, agriculture and cement making – may linger for longer than we would like. It will take time for clean alternatives to arrive and replace them. That means the world also needs to find and ramp up ways of taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere to stabilise the climate. Just meeting the UK’s net-zero target is likely to require the removal of 100 million tonnes of CO₂ a year , similar in size to current emissions from the country’s largest-emitting sector, road transport, but in reverse. The UK government’s announcement of £31.5 million (US$44.7 million) in support for research and development of carbon removal is welcome. And while trials of new tech will help, there are many social issues that need to be tackled if removing greenhouse gases is to succeed. Done right, carbon removal could be the perfect a
Read more

NASA is planning to partner with SpaceX to reboost the Hubble Telescope and extend its life

Image
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most important scientific achievements of the human species that has helped us understand space. It has been in orbit for over 30 years and has been feeding some of the most vital streams of information that has not only helped us steer our space exploration efforts, but also solve some of the more deep mysteries of the universe . NASA would love to extend its usable life for as long as possible. Unfortunately, for some years now, Hubble Space Telescope has been slipping out of its orbit. That is why, NASA is planning to team up with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and place it into a higher much more stable orbit. NASA, SpaceX and Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut with the Polaris Program, hosted a media teleconference on Thursday to announce a feasibility study that will look into sending a commercial Dragon spacecraft to reboost the Hubble Space Telescope . This will, in effect place the telescope into a higher and more stable orbit than it’s curren
Read more