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Mars Rovers of NASA to take a break during solar conjunction to avoid corruption in signals

NASA Has Decided To Stop Sending Commands To Its Three Mars Orbiters And Two Mars Rovers Curiosity And Opportunity For A Couple Of Weeks As The Sun Will Be Almost Directly Between Earth And Mars.

News Nation Bureau | Edited By : Nabanita Chakorborty | Updated on: 17 Jul 2017, 01:12:39 PM
Mars Rovers of NASA to take a break during solar conjunction to avoid corruption in signals

New Delhi:

With a solar conjunction coming soon, NASA is all set to take a break from Mars Rovers to avoid any kind of sun corruption during the time. NASA has decided to stop sending commands to its three Mars orbiters and two Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity for a couple of weeks as the Sun will be almost directly between Earth and Mars.

Though Mars will accurately not be directly behind the Sun during the time, it will be close enough.

While Curiosity is experiencing the solar conjunction for the third time, the incident is for seventh time in case of Opportunity.

From July 22 to August 1 NASA will take a vacation as during the time charged particles from the sun may affect singnals being sent to a spacecraft.

The particles are also able to corrupt any data, the spacecraft is trying to send back. Acording to NASA this corrupted signals and data may arouse confusions and even cause danger in case they follow unclear commands out of confusions.

Also Read: Lunar robots land on 'Mount Etna', most active volcano of Europe

The sun’s corona of hot, ionized gas is preety much able to cause interruptions in radio waves coming from the rovers back to JPL and vice versa.
Talking about their plans regarding Mars Rovers during the time, Chad Edwards, manager of the Mars Relay Network Office at JPL has said, "We will continue to receive telemetry, so we will have information every day about the status of the vehicles."

"All of these spacecraft are now veterans of conjunction, We know what to expect," Edwards stated further.

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First Published : 17 Jul 2017, 12:52:00 PM

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