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

COVID-19 origins: Should we pay more attention to the lab leak theory and formally investigate it?

Image
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid first appeared at the end of 2019. So what do we know for sure, and what do we need still to find out? We know the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is close to that of bat coronaviruses . Several decades ago its “ancestor” was circulating in bat populations in southern Asia. But there are still many unanswered questions: we don’t know how the virus arrived in Wuhan, how its sequence evolved to allow human infection, and under what conditions it infected the first people who crossed its path. And for each of these stages, we don’t know whether there was a human contribution (direct or indirect). Zoonotic transmission pathways, in other words the pas
Read more

Menstrual cups are cheaper, more sustainable than pads and tampons for women

Image
Every year in America, women spend at least US$2.8 billion on sanitary pads and tampons that can take hundreds of years to decompose . Is there a more economical and environmentally friendly way? To find out, we asked Susan Powers , a professor of sustainable environmental systems at Clarkson University about her work comparing the environmental impact of tampons, sanitary pads and menstrual cups. What is a menstrual cup? A menstrual cup is a type of reusable feminine hygiene product. It’s a small, flexible bell-shaped cup made of rubber or silicone that a woman inserts into her vagina to catch and collect menstrual fluid. It can be used for up to 12 hours, after which it is removed to dispose of the fluid and cleaned. The cup is rinsed with hot water and soap between each insertion and sterilized in boiling water at least once per period. A cup can last up to 10 years . Although menstrual cups have been around for decades, they historically have been less popular than pads or ta
Read more

Human bodies respond to infections differently depending on the time of day

Image
When microorganisms – such as bacteria or viruses – infect us, our immune system jumps into action. It’s highly trained to sense and eliminate infections and clear up any damage caused by them. It’s typically assumed our immune systems work the exact same way regardless of whether an infection occurs during the day or at night. But research spanning over half a century now shows our bodies actually respond differently at day and night. The reason for this is our body clock, and the fact that each cell in the body, including our immune cells, can tell what time of day it is. Our body clock has evolved over millions of years to help us survive. Every cell in the body has a collection of proteins that indicate the time depending on their levels. Knowing whether it’s day or night means our body can adjust its functions and behaviours (such as when we want to eat) to the correct time. Our body clock does this by generating 24 hour rhythms (also termed circadian rhythms ) in how cells f
Read more