Sep 28, 2021
NASA’s Mars missions, clockwise from top left: Perseverance rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, InSight lander, Odyssey orbiter, MAVEN orbiter, Curiosity rover, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The missions will continue collecting data about the Red Planet,
though engineers back on Earth will stop sending commands to them until
mid-October.
NASA will stand down from
commanding its Mars missions for the next few weeks while Earth and the Red Planet
are on opposite sides of the Sun. This period, called Mars solar conjunction, happens every two years.
The Sun expels hot, ionized
gas from its corona, which extends far into space. During solar conjunction,
when Earth and Mars can’t “see” each other, this gas can interfere with radio
signals if engineers try to communicate with spacecraft at Mars. That could
corrupt commands and result in unexpected behavior from our deep space
explorers.
To be safe, NASA
engineers send Mars spacecraft a list of simple
commands to carry out for a few weeks. This year, most missions will stop
sending commands between Oct. 2 and Oct. 16. A few extend that commanding
moratorium, as it’s called, a day or two in either direction, depending on the
angular distance between Mars and the Sun in Earth’s sky.
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“Though our Mars missions
won’t be as active these next few weeks, they’ll still let us know their state
of health,” said Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Southern California. “Each mission has been given some homework
to do until they hear from us again.”
Here’s how some of those Mars
missions will be spending that time:
- Perseverance
will take weather measurements with its MEDA (short
for Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) sensors, look for dust devils
with its cameras (though it won’t move its mast, or “head”), run its RIMFAX (Radar
Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment) radar, and capture new sounds with
its microphones.
- The
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will remain stationary at its location 575
feet (175 meters) away from Perseverance and communicate its status weekly
to the rover.
- The
Curiosity rover will take weather measurements using its REMS (Rover
Environmental Monitoring Station) sensors, take radiation measurements
with its RAD (Radiation
Assessment Detector) and DAN (Dynamic
Albedo of Neutrons) sensors, and look for dust devils with its suite of
cameras.
- The
stationary InSight lander will continue using its seismometer to
detect temblors like the large marsquakes it
captured recently.
- NASA’s
three orbiters – Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN – will
all continue relaying some data from the agency’s surface missions back to
Earth, in addition to gathering their own science.
While a limited amount of
science data will reach Earth during conjunction, the spacecraft will save most
of it until after the moratorium. (That means there will be a temporary pause
in the stream of raw images available from Perseverance, Curiosity, and InSight.)
Then, they’ll beam their
remaining data to NASA’s Deep Space Network, a system of massive
Earth-based radio antennas managed by JPL. Engineers will spend about a week
downloading the information before normal spacecraft operations resume. If the
teams monitoring these missions determine any of the collected science data has
been corrupted, they can usually have that data retransmitted.
For more about NASA’s Mars
missions, visit:
News
Media Contact
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
Karen Fox / Alana
Johnson
NASA Headquarters,
Washington
301-286-6284 /
202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
2021-200
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