Mars rovers to keep idling during eclipse

Opportunity and Curiosity will soon get a respite from their human operators on Earth as from the next week the red planet will come directly behind the sun from the earth’s perspective.

Call it a spring break for the two Nasa’s Mars rovers. Opportunity and Curiosity will soon get a respite from their human operators on Earth as from the next week the red planet will come directly behind the sun from the earth’s perspective. This will prevent their ‘ human bosses’ from sending signals or commands.

HT Image

“During Mars-Sun-Earth alignments, the Sun can disrupt radio transmissions between the two planets,” Dr Amitabha Ghosh, chair of the Science Operations Working Group at Nasa Mars Exploration Rover Mission, told HT.

“This phenomenon is called solar conjunction. It is a cosmic event just like any eclipse. The whole event will last for 3-4 weeks in April during which we will not send any command to the rovers so as to prevent an impaired command from reaching them.”

Every 26 months, the path between Mars and Earth is disrupted due to their orbits around the sun, hindering communication with other spacecraft.

“This is the time when the two rovers will have to fend for themselves,” Dr Ghosh said adding: “They have inbuilt computers and can work without human interventions. Once the conjunction is over, we will be able to retrieve all the onboard data from the computers.”

Explaining the scientific findings made so far, he said that a potentially habitable environment had been detected on Mars. “This means it could have been possible for life to survive in that environment. Curiosity has also uncovered in Maritan rocks, the presence of sulphur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — all of which are building blocks.