Sun To Pause NASA Mars Missions in June

Sun's blocking of Mars from Earth during this month will prevent NASA from controlling its Red Planet missions. The space agency is preparing to restrict communications during the period the event lasts.

The Mars Solar conjunction occurs every 26 months when the planets are on the opposite sides of the sun along their orbits. With the sun in between the planets, radio signals sent from either side could be garbled, resulting in data loss and damage to equipment. NASA has announced that it would restrict transmission to emergency commanding between June 7 and June 21.

"Our overall approach is based on what we did for the solar conjunction two years ago, which worked well. It is really helpful to have been through this before," said Nagin Cox an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Mission teams will clear memory from the rovers and orbiters to enable data collection during the conjunction period. Though two of the orbiters will transmit data during conjunction, the teams can retrieve the data from onboard memory.

NASA has Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on Mars while it operates three orbiters including MAVEN, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.