NASA is putting pause on sending commands to its Mars exploration instruments from November 11 through November 25 as it waits out the Mars solar conjunction. With the sun in the way, any commands sent to Mars could suffer interference capable of harming the robotic explorers.
    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      16·
      11 months ago

      Don’t be daft, that isn’t how it works. When it is night then the moon will be in the way.

      • zappson@lemm.ee
        3·
        11 months ago

        Twilight may work then. They just need to thread the needle using beam-forming to ensure the comms make it past those pesky celestial bodies.

    • marsokod@lemmy.world
      13·
      11 months ago

      Can we? Yes. Should we do it right now? That’s debatable.

      The question is how much this would cost vs getting a two weeks offline every 26 months?

      These two weeks do not create any additional requirements (you already have to make sure the probes can survive for a few weeks without comms), science does not fully stops during these two weeks. And it gives an opportunity to do long duration maintenance on the ground segment.

      Frankly, there is little need to spend >$100M for such relays satellites until we actually have a permanent human presence on Mars.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
        4·
        11 months ago

        Even when we have a permanent human presence on Mars, there isn’t a great necessity to maintain contact for those two weeks. Even if something goes wrong, it’s not like anyone could send help. Essentially it would be just so we knew what was going on, but that’s not really a full time requirement.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      4·
      11 months ago

      There’s no pressing time urgency. It’s okay to wait 2 weeks so yeah we could but it’s an enormous expense and not worth it

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 months ago

      We use very large radio dishes to communicate with craft at Mars, so that the spacecraft can use smaller dishes and less power. In order to add a relay at L4/L5, that relay would also need very large dishes and high power usage to reach the craft at Mars. Probably larger than anything we have in earth orbit today.

        • brianorca@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          Maybe in the future, but the existing Mars orbiters need to hear a strong radio signal. And laser communication has not yet been tested outside of Earth orbit. It will need to be significantly scaled up to handle the 2-3AU distance.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          11 months ago

          A school gets shot up, or it doesn’t. Another genocide starts, or it doesn’t. A telescope collapses, or it doesn’t. It gets worse, or it stays the same. Not once in all my life has the evening news been like “This just in: A clean, abundant and inexpensive source of energy has been found which is leading to millions of hungry people being fed. We now go on location to ABC correspondent Tish Yu for the details.”