Even in my most optomistic moments I can not believe that Lazarus mode will suceed in rebooting Phoenix next Spring. Broken tracks and components will make this impossible.

However I do believe that if contact is lost with Spirit next winter due to lack of power that Spirit will phone home again in the following Spring. The great advantage that Spirit has over Phoenix is that Spirit has a well insulated warm electronics box with 8 little radioactive heaters to keep it warm.

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecr...rover_body.html

So far as MSL is concerned I think that MSL's RTG will ensure that MSL will continue working on Mars for decades after broken wheels have turned it into a fixed lander.

"The great advantage that Spirit has over Phoenix is that Spirit has a well insulated warm electronics box with 8 little radioactive heaters to keep it warm."

Why wasn't this feature put on Phoenix?

I've written another - probably my last, for obvious reasons - poem about Phoenix, which some of you might be interested in. It's rather long (gasps of shock from everyone... I don't think! ) so I'm not posting it here, and it's probably a bit too much for some people anyway, so here's a link to it on my poetry blog.

"Preparing To Sleep"

Not intended to be an obituary, as such, more of a celebration of a short life well lived.

Hope some of you like it.

Because Death by Winter was the accepted fate for this mission. Waste of space, time and money to add such heaters for a few extra sols.

Stu, I thought your poem was excellent! A bit sad, but simultaneously evoking the history of terrestrial arctic exploration. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Actually, I did like this one. (Nitpick: shouldn't "arboreal" just be "boreal" in stanza 1? I see no trees here. :-)

Stanzas 1 and 2 are very strong, I think; although "in fear" jarred me in #2, I thought that "I don't think I can stay awake much longer" was VERY powerful.

Stanza 3 almost worked for me, but, again, things like "have I make you proud" were jarring. (Maybe I just want a more fatalistic rover -- "That which we are, we are" and all that. Or maybe just a stoic one.) But from "I reached out" down I loved it -- minus "TEGA".

Below that, I thought a comparison with Scott would have been much more powerful than with Shackleton, but I loved the general idea. Of course, a Scott quote like "God this is an awful place" would have been a bummer. ;-)

In fact, the poem reaches such power with Shackleton's quote that (for my money) it needs to end there. The last stanza felt like a let-down to me. Some nice images there -- "Glorious days, when a Phoenix flew to Mars!" -- but the shade of a Hero is a tough act to follow.

--Greg (Okay, now I'll go back to preparing for my "Random Processes" midterm) :-)

Very nice poem, Stuart.

I think the role of a poet is to connect the dots and create a "true" metaview of being. There are a lot of very good dot creators here, but not many dot connectors. You, sir, are a very good dot connector.

Stuart, this will not be your last Phoenix poem.

The "true" meaning of life comes after death.

Perhaps a poem about bright eyed children staring at Phoenix in the Prehisory wing of a Martian museum?

One of my knee weakening epiphonies occurred holding a Cambrian worm cast in my hand while fossil hunting with my children and realizing this that very trail could have been made by one of my direct ancestors -- and that my own trail in the mud leading to an unimaginable future was now made.

Think about that for a moment.

Thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. I'm tidying up the poem cos after reading it back at work during a break I spotted a few improvements I could make, too, and I think it,s now much better.

Very profound thought, Hort...

A lot of frost seen on sol 151.
=> Dedicated to Stu's nice poem.
Not the imaging epitaph I hope. Enjoy !
Click to view attachment

So is Phoenix still "alive" then?

I don't see any pictures past Sol 151...anyone know if Phoenix is alive ?

I hope that it will be like in the case of death Twain and you will soon receive a message from Phoenix "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"

After the low power fault, they decided to let it spend a few sols recharging before doing anything new.

Better news from NASA Phoenix Twitter:

Great....hang in there !

Richard Feynman: "This dying is boring."

Not to be a pessimist now that Phoenix is not doing quite well - just thinking of further discoveries that can be done with Phoenix, I wonder how will the EDL hardware look in the spring in hirise images. I guess it will be a reference in the search for MPL.
And just out of curiosity, in the very (very) unlikely case of Phoenix actually surviving the winter, will there be a new mission extension?

Andrei

there is limited communication and team will try for more science. any day could be the last

here is the latest UA update from 3 Nov 08. http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/11_03_pr.php

NASA Hearing Daily From Weak Phoenix Mars Lander

That sounds very very bad. But it's been a great mission to watch, and I eagerly await the science to follow after the data is analyzed fully.

It also sounds like the batteries were not able to be fully charged. Did the commands to turn off the heaters ever work ?

There is still plenty to be done with the images we have. Step-by-step movies of scraping in Snow White, or compiling all feature names from the TAMU descriptions on one mosaic, for instance. The mission's not over yet!

Phil

Seems the sun is now 10 degrees below the horizon at night now.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~sbporter/MarsSundial2.1.html

I wonder if they have any new pictures from Phoenix......if someone from the team is reading can we see it please ?

They don't. As of yesterday they had still not commanded Phoenix out of Lazarus mode, in which it is only trying to communicate, not do anything else. We'll have to wait until they can get the terminal science mode sequence uplinked. Even then, we may not get pictures -- pictures require more power than pressure, temperature, and TECP measurements, so those will be done and telemetered first before Phoenix tries to take any pictures with any remaining power.

--Emily

Any idea what the terminal science mode sequence consists of ?

I presume that Phoenix is transmiting a small packet of engineering data each day?

Does engineering data normally included a temperature reading? If Phoenix is returning temperature readings then do they show that increased dust in the atmosphere has actually raised the temperature?

Can engineering data be mined for other scientific results? For example can the electricity output from the solar panels be used to estimate the atmospheric dust level?

See Emily's blog for details.

I think we are all suprised at how quick the power situation went downhill.

It was always going to be hard to figure out precisely when Phoenix was going to start to die but we did know that the power loss situation was going to start getting dramatically worse around now. I had estimated that, all thing being equal, she would have been operating at around 50% of initial solar panel power per sol around now and dropping dramatically towards zero. The sudden storm has thrown a wobble into that and I am certain that my estimates of available power tended to overestimate the power from the panels at low solar angles but even so I'm somewhat surprised that she's gone into near death mode this early - I had thought we'd be closer to Sol 200 (and ~25% of initial power levels) before she started to die from loss of power. Clearly though my original estimates were quite a bit out of kilter with reality.

The status updates mention that on the day they turned off the heater, they made their last use of TEGA. Was this completed? Also, are there any results from the now-defunct instruments still on board? I would think that downloading these would be a top priority now.

I'm not aware of any recoverable science data still on board, other than maybe in the MET/Lidar flash. The Biblical Lazarus may have come back with memory intact, but Phoenix comes back thinking it is the day before launch (or some such) and wondering why the touchdown sensors indicate she has landed. And so, Phoenix realizes something has gone very wrong, and begins the Lazarus mode comm strategy.

It looks like the weather situation may have improved, but there is no science and little engineering data to directly confirm that. As Emily said, once there is a good comm session, JPL can regain control. If control is restored, getting into terminal mode science will probably take precedence over anything other than maintaining or improving control. Risks will be avoided due to the already precarious situation. The terminal mode would be very repetitive and would extend the period for which Phoenix returns weather info as long as possible. It is just not obvious Phoenix can handle more than that in Lazarus mode. In the best possible future, the lander's abilities are much diminished, and the ability to respond to conventional science commands is gone, so the commanding strategy is new. So beyond met-related data, expect maybe 30 or so repeated images per sol (sky & frost monitoring) from SSI, and maybe attempts with RAC and maybe attempts with MARDI. And frankly, even that will soon be overly ambitious.

I don't think the situation should be that big a surprise. Before landing, sol 150 was the conventional answer to "how long could the mission last". The power available hit the power needed curve at that time. Weather had been unseasonably favorable, so it looked like Phoenix could go longer before moving to desperation strategies like sacrificing instruments. When the weather turned, it was just to the seasonal pattern that should be in place by sol 150--cloudy and stormy. Sol 200 was never realistic, except maybe as the end of waking up in Lazarus mode for a month, in good circumstances. One factor, by the way, is that it is not just the low power, but also the cold. More power is needed to stay alive; much more was always needed compared to the rovers. Spirit has just set a new record low power level, but still maintained more activity compared to the previous low in winter. Why? It is warmer than in winter. And that is for a tropical location, with RHUs.

A few more details in a new New Scientist article, including

I was looking for something that summarized the mission accomplishments versus the goals, and that NS article was helpful in that regard. Thanks, fredk. It appears as if Phoenix managed to perform many of the tasks that were assigned to it. It seems to have been a success, but who is keeping the scorecard?

Forget me for a very innocent question.
Spirit was nearly lost because her flash memory was full of informations gathered before landing that she didn't need anymore at that time.
Now Phoenix is fooled by the touchdown sensors, an information that, in absolute, could have been deleted.
What are the rationales for keeping this on bord? Can "we" build on these exemples to change, in the future, the post landing strategies regarding these issues?

I don't think Deimos meant that anything that Phoenix is doing is the result of some problem with the touchdown sensors. It's just that Phoenix' clock gets reset every time the power goes out, same as the clock on your microwave. "Lazarus mode" is designed to deal with this problem.

--Emily

My understanding is the physical touchdown sensor, not file clutter, is useful to Phoenix right now, to know that Lazarus mode is needed (as opposed to sitting and patiently waiting for launch or some other unproductive thing). This is not part of the problem, but of the solution.

I'm curious now. Assuming that somehow the available energy comes back up to a suitable level for basic operations, how would functionality be restored? Would the flash have to be purged & reloaded (which would presumably require several orbiter passes), or are the basic functions a sort of firmware & therefore immune from power glitches?

Yes, of course. As far as I know there is no issue at all with the flash, the problem is that the spacecraft clock keeps getting reset to 0. The explanation about the spacecraft thinking it's before launch isn't what I would have expected (most missions have "mission phase bits" that are kept in a nearly-bulletproof type of non-volatile memory) but I don't think any of this has anything to do with the contents of flash.

Thank you Mark & Emily. Very interesting to see how one (at least me ) could guess the oposite of the reality.