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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sol 0213: Hunkering Down for Solar Conjunction
The panorama is made up of 100 individual Mastcam-Z images stitched together. The images were taken on Sol 213 (September 24, 2021).
There’s no way around it: due to their orbits, Mars and the Earth have to stop communicating with each other for about two weeks every two years. This quiet period is called solar conjunction, and for the Perseverance team that means we can’t send new instructions to the rover between sols 217-235 (Sept. 28 – Oct. 17).
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. Melissa Rice Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover:
Associate Professor of Planetary Science at Western Washington University
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
