Les jours de Phoenix sont comptés

NASA Finishes Listening for Phoenix Mars Lander


PASADENA, Calif. -- After nearly a month of daily checks to determine whether Martian NASA's Phoenix
Mars Lander would be able to communicate again, the agency has stopped
using its Mars orbiters to hail the lander and listen for its beep.



As expected, reduced daily sunshine eventually left the solar-powered Phoenix craft without enough energy to keep its batteries charged.



The final communication from Phoenix remains a brief signal received via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter on Nov. 2. The Phoenix
lander operated for two overtime months after achieving its science
goals during its original three-month mission. It landed on a Martian
arctic plain on May 25.


"The variability of the Martian weather was a contributing factor to
our loss of communications, and we were hoping that another variation
in weather might give us an opportunity to contact the lander again,"
said Phoenix Mission Manager Chris Lewicki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.



The end of efforts to listen for Phoenix with Odyssey and NASA's
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had been planned for the start of solar
conjunction, when communications between Earth and Mars-orbiting
spacecraft are minimized for a few week. That period, when the sun is
close to the line between Earth and Mars, has begun and will last until
mid-December.


The last attempt to listen for a signal from Phoenix
was when Odyssey passed overhead at 3:49 p.m. PST Saturday, Nov. 29
(4:26 p.m. local Mars solar time on the 182nd Martian day, or sol,
since Phoenix landed). Nov. 29 was selected weeks ago as the final date for relay monitoring of Phoenix
because it provided several weeks to the chance to confirm the fate of
the lander, and it coincided with the beginning of solar conjunction
operations for the orbiters. When they come out of the conjunction
period, weather on far-northern Mars will be far colder, and the
declining sunshine will have ruled out any chance of hearing from Phoenix.



The Phoenix
mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson,
with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed
Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian
Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the
universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck
Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and
Imperial College, London. The California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.