NASA has stopped communicating with robotic explorers, but this is not the end of their long connection.
Like all relationships, sometimes two parties are forced to separate from each other if a third party begins to interfere and threaten their healthy communication with each other – in this case, that party is the Sun.
Every two years, NASA cuts transmissions with its fleet of Martian robots for two weeks when Earth and Mars end up on opposite sides of the sun, their signals blocked by the great fireball. According to NASA.
This year, contact will be cut off between November 11 and 25, after which NASA and the robots will be reunited with each other until the Sun interferes with their communications again in a few years.
The robots include the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, and a series of orbiters called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Odyssey and MAVEN.
This cut is called the “solar conjunction of Mars.” The exploration mission was temporarily halted due to hot, ionized gas emanating from the sun, which could cause tainted radio signals between NASA and its Martian robots.
While the signals sent to NASA would be nice to receive, as lost data corrupted by the Sun can always be recovered after Earth and Mars align again, it is too risky for the robots, which could receive intermittent, potentially dangerous instructions. To the mission.
However, during low signals, robots cannot get off the hook so easily.
Before the sun blocks the signal, NASA sends a task list to its robots, which are asked to monitor changes in surface conditions, weather and radiation while they’re parked, the space program said.
NASA said it is able to receive health check updates from its fleet of robots, but there will be two full days of silence once Mars is fully behind the sun’s disk.
During a communication gap, Pocket Payment Testers said they usually catch up on other tasks pending on their to-do lists or take a well-deserved break.
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