NASA is set to temporarily lose contact with its Mars rovers and satellites, as the Red Planet will soon dip behind the side of the sun opposite the Earth.
According to Discovery News, the event is called a solar conjunction and Mars experiences one with the Earth every 26 months. NASA is expecting to lose communications with their Martian machinery from June 7 to 21.
The space agency will not attempt to reach the following rovers and orbiters: Curiosity, Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and MAVEN.
"Our overall approach is based on what we did for the solar conjunction two years ago, which worked well," Nagin Cox, a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said in a press release. "It is really helpful to have been through this before."
The MAVEN orbiter (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) is about to experience its first solar conjunction since arriving at Mars in Sept. It will still be able to gather data, but ground control will not be able to receive it until after the 21st.
"The data will be stored and transmitted back to us after communications are reestablished at the end of the solar conjunction period," James Morrissey, MAVEN deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., said in the release.
