In a momentary hiatus, NASA’s interplanetary communications face a temporary blackout as Mars, the focus of several ongoing missions, drifts behind the Sun from the Earth’s perspective. This natural occurrence, known as solar conjunction, disrupts radio communications between Earth and Mars due to interference from the Sun’s intense radio emissions. This phenomenon occurs once every 25 months or so as Earth and Mars travel along their respective orbits.
During this time, NASA has ceased all communications with their missions on Mars, leaving them to do some basic science during this ‘celestial break’. To receive all of the images and science data collected by their rovers and spacecraft, NASA needs a relatively free path for the radio signals sent by those missions.
This also applies to all the instructions the NASA teams send to their distant explorers. Usually, this isn’t a problem. However, during the Mars Solar Conjunction, the Red Planet will be on the exact opposite side of the Sun from Earth, making it difficult to send and receive signals.
NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from November 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the Sun. The missions pause because hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun’s corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA’s Mars spacecraft, leading to unexpected behaviours.
During this period, NASA’s Mars robots will receive their commands from the mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, but communications will fall silent. However, all of NASA’s vehicles will continue to gather data, but won’t beam any of it back to Earth until the solar conjunction has passed.
NASA’s Mars robots include the Perseverance rover, which reached the Martian surface in 2021, and the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012. NASA’s three orbiters — Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN — are also affected. NASA’s Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, will also take a well-earned break before receiving its next flight plan, delivered via its travel partner, Perseverance.
Perseverance will monitor weather and radiation changes, while the Mars Reconnaissance and Odyssey orbiters will continue taking images of the red planet’s surface, and MAVEN will track interactions between the solar wind and the Martian atmosphere.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, acting as a relay station for data sent from the surface of Mars, will continue collecting information from the missions during this period. However, it will store this data until the conjunction ends and a clear communication path is reestablished.
During this time, NASA’s Deep Space Network will be relatively quiet, and the robotic fleet will still operate, albeit without the close supervision they usually receive. NASA’s mission teams have spent months preparing to-do lists for all their Mars spacecraft, and they will still be able to hear from them and check their states of health over the next few weeks.
Once the solar conjunction phase concludes, NASA’s missions to Mars will gradually resume their full operational capabilities. Engineers will conduct comprehensive checks to ensure the health and status of the spacecraft before resuming regular data transmission and scientific activities.
