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This image was acquired using the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on ESA's Mars express spacecraft on 10 November 2023 at 06:28:27 UTC. It was taken from an altitude of 7690.16 km above Mars, during Mars Express orbit number 25073 and the 2023 Mars solar conjunction.
‘Solar conjunction season’ for Mars occurs roughly once every 25 months. During this period, Mars is located on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. The season is defined as the period during which the angle in the sky between the Sun and Mars as seen from Earth is less than 4°.
In 2023, the season takes place between 5 November and 2 December.
During the conjunction, the radio signals used to send commands from Earth to the spacecraft and to receive signals from the spacecraft can be disturbed by the Sun’s active atmosphere – the solar corona. This greatly limits the data that can be exchanged with spacecraft, landers, rovers and future humans at the Red Planet during this period.
However, over the course of the many conjunctions that Mars Express has experienced in its two decades at Mars, the spacecraft's control team at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, have discovered that some limited scientific activities are safe to carry out during this period, such as acquiring images like this one with the VMC.