Official News page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: RIP PHOENIX LANDER

by Hazed

While we were taking our two-week break, the world said bye-bye to the Phoenix Lander probe on Mars. As expected, as the Martian winter falls, it has gone silent and is now almost certainly dead. Its last communication with Earth was a brief message on Sunday November 2, and NASA has declared an end to the project.

During its short life on the red planet, Phoenix made some thrilling discoveries. It was launched from Earth in August 2007 and arrived on Mars in May of this year, landing at the Martian north pole after a fiery plunge through the thin atmosphere, using a parachute and thrusters to control its descent. The original schedule called for the mission to last just three months but it actually continued for several months longer before the probe finally died.

Phoenix's major achievement was in becoming the first to find water, in the form of water-ice just below the topsoil. Chunks of ice could be seen vaporizing before the lander's cameras. It even recorded snowfall on the planet.

The lander snapped more than 25,000 pictures, ranging from panoramic views of its Arctic landing site to atomic scale images of dust grains in its microscope. It's left the mission's scientists with a mass of data that will keep them busy for decades.

As the Martian winter starts, the Phoenix lander was starved of light at its Arctic location, which meant its solar panels couldn't produce enough energy to charge up the batteries. They regularly went flat, which prevented the robot from heating its systems as local temperatures headed down to minus 100 degrees centigrade. The final straw was a dust storm which obscured the Sun/'s rays even further.

As winter progresses, Phoenix will be covered in a thick layer of carbon dioxide frost and as the ice builds up on its solar arrays, they will quite likely crack and fall off. The electronics will also break up in the cold, which means reviving the probe later is quite unlikely. Phoenix really is dead.

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