We’ve already sent Perseverance a set of commands so it can perform science activities without having “ground in the loop,” meaning that they pose no risk to the rover’s safety, and the team won’t need to check that they successfully completed each day.

In my role on the science team as a Long-Term Planner, I work on the strategic plan for what the rover will do in the next days, weeks and months. Lately, that includes experiments that can be repeated before and after the conjunction break, which are unique opportunities to monitor longer-term changes to the rocks and soils around the rover. To look for differences in the terrain due to the wind moving sand and dust, we will take a 360-degree panorama with Navcam on sol 214, and again on sol 236.

We’ll also repeat detailed measurements of the soil composition using SuperCam and Mastcam-Z. Because it generates a lot of heat, we’ll look underneath the rover’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to see if the soil dehydrates over time. If this happens, the rover’s spectrometers might pick up subtle changes to key absorption features.

Solar conjunction gives the science team a much-needed break from operations, but it’s not exactly vacation time. We have a lot of data from our recent weeks of exploring South Séítah to scrutinize, and big decisions coming up. As a Long-Term Planner, I will be helping to lead telecons each week during conjunction so the science team can discuss where we should collect our next samples in South Séítah– and beyond.

Solar conjunction is also an opportunity for us step back and reflect. In our day-to-day operations, it’s easy to stay deep into the weeds of mission technicalities, and to lose sight of the profundity of operating a robot on an alien world. The rover datasets are so detailed that we spend hours scrutinizing a patch of rock the size of a postage stamp and can forget that these rocks are more than a hundred million miles away! But solar conjunction is a reminder that this work isn’t your standard day job, and that Mars isn’t just a geologic field site – it’s an astronomical object, performing its own cosmic dance around our common Sun.

Written by Melissa Rice, Associate Professor of Planetary Science at Western Washington University

Arizona State University leads the operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover: http://www.360cities.net/sets/perseverance-mars