Astronomy

After operating for more than five months, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased its communications with Earth controller. This marks end of almost six month of successful mission on red planet – nearly twice than expected.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft’s work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

The spacecraft is unlikely to survive the coming Martian winter, during which temperatures are expected to plunge to -240°F (-150°C). It was expected that the probe will become encased in frozen CO2. Phoenix’s fragile solar-cell arrays, not designed to support much weight, will likely crack and fall off the vehicle.

Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface. The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet’s soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix’s cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.

You can read more about the bad news here, or instead you can revel in all that Phoenix has accomplished here.

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