WASHINGTON, September 29 (BNA) – The US space agency (NASA) said today, Tuesday, that the US space agency (NASA) will step down from leading its missions to Mars until mid-October while Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun.
While engineers will stop sending commands, NASA said, the missions will continue to collect data about Mars during this period, called the Mars-solar conjunction, which occurs every two years.
During solar conjunction, gas emitted from the Sun can interfere with radio signals if engineers attempt to communicate with spacecraft on Mars.
This could confound orders and lead to unexpected behavior from deep space explorers, NASA said.
“Although our missions to Mars will not be active for the next few weeks, they will tell us about their health,” Roy Gladen, director of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Deutsche News (dpa). ) mentioned.
“Each assignment was assigned some homework to do so that they would hear from us again.”
The Persevering Rover and Curiosity will take weather and radiation measurements and search for dust demons, while the Ingenuity Mars helicopter will remain stationary.
The stationary probe InSight will continue to use its seismometer to detect earthquakes such as the large earthquakes it captured recently.
NASA’s three orbital vehicles — the Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN — will continue to transmit some data from the agency’s surface missions back to Earth, as well as their science collection.
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