NASA Perseverance rover gets rolling again as Mars solar conjunction ends

NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars is back to its routine of exploration as the two-week-long solar conjunction ended on October 19. Relatively inactive for the last two weeks, the rover set its wheels rolling on the red planet and flexed about it on Twitter with a video captioned, "Solar conjunction is over and I’m ready to get rolling again. Nothing like the feel of Mars under your wheels". Along with the rover, other Martian robots such as the Curiosity rover and the Martian orbiter were also laying low. 

The Mars Solar Conjunction

After every two Earth years, a phenomenon called the Mars Solar Conjunction occurs when the Sun comes in between the orbits of Earth and Mars. This phenomenon lasts typically two weeks, and communications between the scientists on Earth and the robots of Mars become minimal. The NASA scientists direct the Martian explorers to lay low during the entire period as the hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun’s corona can corrupt commands, resulting in equipment malfunction. 

While the robots were on their two-week vacation, they were not entirely shut down. The fleet of robots on Mars currently includes the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity helicopter, the Curiosity rover, InSight lander and three orbiters – Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN that carried several experiments on their own. 

During the conjunction, the Perseverance rover was commanded to take weather measurements and use its cameras and microphones to discover “dust devils” and new sounds respectively. The Ingenuity helicopter on the other hand communicated its weekly status to the rover 175 meters away from Perseverance. 

As for the Curiosity rover, it recorded weather and radiation measurements while its cameras will also look for information in the dust and the Insight lander kept doing what it is meant to which is looking for Marsquakes using its seismometer. Mars also has three orbiters hovering in its orbit that relayed data from Mars to the Earth. 

Now that the solar conjunction is over, the devices will transmit the information at their full capacity and the NASA engineers will download the images beamed back to Earth at the agency's Deep Space Network.

Image: Twitter/@NASAPersevere