Spacecraft-related Issues
There is also a risk that an antenna equipped with auto-tracking will begin following the suns movements instead of the satellite once they are no longer inline with each other. This is because the Sun acts as a large electromagnetic noise generator which creates a signal much stronger than the satellite's tracking signal. A recent example of limitations caused by the solar conjunction ocurred when the NASA-JPL team put the Curiosity rover on mars surface in autonomous operation mode for 25 days during the conjunction. In autonomos mode Curiosity suspends all movements and active science operations but retain communication-independent experiments (e.g. record atmospheric and radiation data).
The term can also refer to the passage of the line of sight to an interior planet (Mercury or Venus) being very close to the solar disk. If the planet passes directly in front of the sun, a solar transit occurs.
Read more about this topic: Solar Conjunction
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