NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will lose communication with ground control teams for 2-weeks during the Mars solar conjunction, which happens every other year. This pause is necessary because the hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun’s corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA’s Mars spacecraft, resulting in unexpected behaviors.
Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will continue monitor changes in surface conditions, weather, as well as radiation as they stay parked on the Martian surface during this time. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will use its color camera to study the movement of sand, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Odyssey orbiter are set to continue imaging the surface.
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Our mission teams have spent months preparing to-do lists for all our Mars spacecraft. We’ll still be able to hear from them and check their states of health over the next few weeks,” said Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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