It’s official, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is dead.
The U.S. space agency has confirmed that its tenacious robot has not survived the harsh arctic winter on the Red planet and seems to have suffered serious ice damage to its solar panels.
The agency, which has been trying in vein to contact the spacecraft since January, said that a new image transmitted by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed signs of severe ice damage to the lander’s solar panels.
Although the Odyssey orbiter “flew over the Phoenix landing site 61 times during a final attempt to communicate with the lander”, Phoenix remained silent.
“It also did not communicate during 150 flights in three earlier listening campaigns this year,” the agency said in a statement.
Phoenix was launched on August 4, 2007 and touched down on the Martian surface on 25 May 2008. It last communicated on November 2, 2008, at the end of a mission during which it confirmed and examined patches of the widespread deposits of underground water ice detected by Odyssey.
The lander also identified a mineral called calcium carbonate that suggested occasional presence of thawed water on the planet.
The mission’s biggest surprise was the discovery of perchlorate - an oxidising chemical on Earth that is food for some microbes and potentially toxic for others.
“The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime,” said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“Although its work is finished, analysis of information from Phoenix’s science activities will continue for some time to come.”
According to NASA, Phoenix was not designed to survive the dark, cold, icy winter. However, the slim possibility Phoenix survived could not be eliminated without listening for the lander after abundant sunshine returned.
An image of Phoenix taken this month by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggested the lander no longer casts shadows the way it did during its working lifetime.
“Before and after images are dramatically different,” said Michael Mellon of the University of Colorado in Boulder, a science team member for both Phoenix and HiRISE.
“The lander looks smaller, and only a portion of the difference can be explained by accumulation of dust on the lander, which makes its surfaces less distinguishable from surrounding ground.”
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reached the planet in 2006 to begin a two-year primary science mission. Its data show Mars had diverse wet environments at many locations for differing durations during the planet’s history, and climate change cycles persist into the present era.
