Sun to block communication between Mangalyaan and ISRO in June

Bengaluru, Jan 5: Come June and the ISRO team would lost its communication with its ambitious space project Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) for 15 days.

According to report in Times of India, former ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said at the Indian Science Congress that this will be the first such long communication break between ISRO team and MOM since its launch on Nov 5, 2013.

Radhakrishnan further told that the blackout will be the result of an eclipse and it will be from June 8 to 22.
MOM project director Subbiah Arunan said that the blackout will happen because the Sun will come between Earth and Mars, blocking the view of the red planet. He said that during the blackout, data cannot be transmitted to the spacecraft or downlinked.

"There have been many manoeuvres when there has been a communication blackout, but this is the first time it is happening for as long as 14 day," Arunan has been quoted as saying in the report.

The Mars Orbiter launched on November 5, 2013 onboard ISRO's PSLV C25 from Sriharikota entered the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014 after a nine-month long odyssey, making India the first country in the world to succeed in such inter-planetary mission in the maiden attempt itself.

Since then, the spacecraft has been sending data, including pictures of the terrain of the Red planet to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which are being received at Bangalore and being sent to Space Application Centre and Physical Research Laboratory, both located at Ahmedabad for analysis.

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