Sol 150 raws are up so this seems like a good time to start a new thread...

Hang on in there Phoenix...

Yes, it's heartening to see Phoenix last way past its original 90 day mission. I'd say Phoenix will make it to 180 sols - twice the length of the primary mission. I just hope that they switch the microphone on before the end. I can't wait to hear the sounds of Mars.

Firstly - I'd urge caution on expecting any number of sols for survival. Another 30 sols is possible, but a long way from being certain.

Also - don't get too excited by the microphone. It may not work - and if it does - it will almost certainly be unspectacular. If you want to know what Mars sounds like - go and stand 100,000ft above the Sahara at 4 in the morning when there are no aircraft around.

Doug

I know there will probably be no real "background" sounds audible... no moaning martain wind, no rasp of dust grains trickling over the mic... but I'd settle for some clanks and clonks if they start banging those "Pots and pans" Peter Smith talked about...

Frost on this sol I think

I'll echo what Doug said. Every downlink is precious now. I'm not suggesting Phoenix cannot reach sol 180, but there will be many opportunities between now and then for the capricious weather to throw Phoenix into safe mode or worse. TEGA, RA, and RAC are now living on borrowed time, and we'll need to see a smooth transition to post-RA ops before we can contemplate sol 180. A solar-powered life above the Martian arctic circle is a hard life right about now.

Full quote of previous post removed - Mod

Does anyone know of a website which shows the Earth date equivalent of the current Mars year? What is the Earth equivalent date and also sunrise-sunset times for the Phoenix landing site? Knowing this would make the changing season more easy to understand for us Earthlings.

This year, by coincidence, the northern hemisphere summer solstice on both Earth and Mars differed by only a few days. The Martian year is close to two Earth Years. Therefore, the coming winter solstice on Earth will be close to the Mars fall equinox. So it is now late summer at the Phoenix site. But Mars weather probably doesn't have much of a lag following the seasons like Earth weather does. So even late summer is getting somewhat dicey.

Download the Mars24 applet and you can find sunrise/set times and also the current solar longitude. Solar longitude counts up from 0 to 360, beginning from the northern vernal equinox at 0. Earth's northern vernal equinox is around March 20; every 30 degrees of Martian solar longitude is equal to about another "month." So here are (very rough) equivalent dates to Martian solar longitude (give or take several days because of Earth's varying month lengths and because Mars' orbit is pretty elliptical, so some of its "months" last MUCH longer than others, but this is a first approximation):
Ls 0 - March 20
Ls 10 - April 1
Ls 40 - May 1
Ls 70 - June 1
Ls 100 - July 1
Ls 130 - August 1
Ls 160 - September 1
Ls 190 - October 1
Ls 220 - November 1
Ls 250 - December 1
Ls 280 - January 1
Ls 310 - February 1
Ls 340 - March 1

Mars24 tells me it's currently Ls 148.5, so it's now equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of the third week of August. Back to school!

I've got a page on the Martian calendar here that tells you more about how the lengths of the seasons vary because of the elliptical orbit.

--Emily

Couple of new colourisations at my online gallery, if anyone wants a look... As usual, not offered as scientififically accurate or useful, just sharing a couple of unashamedly pretty pictures.

The beginning of the end:

JPL Phoenix Mission News: NASA's Phoenix Mission Faces Survival Challenges

Goodbye, robotic arm! Thanks!

Oh well - guess I was wrong in the other thread, it is the end for RA. I hope we get a pic of the arm's final location. Inquiring cartographers want to know!

Phil

Despite the repeated warnings, it still feels sad to see Phoenix fade away :-(

very sad to see fading away

like we are losing a close family member

lets enjoy our remaining time together and remember the great times we shared

ken

Dang, I forgot about solar conjunction.

It's extremely sad for those of us who were close to Phoenix. Many long hours, around the clock, spent with this wonderful creature. I saw her -- within a few feet -- before she left this sphere. And spent hours and days with those wonderful minds who created this dream and made something happen so many tens of million miles away. It will be years before we realize all the possibilities that our little Phoenix has created. She will remain a testimonial and a tribute to the hundreds of people who worked to make her and the mission a success.
Cheers little Phoenix! We salute you!

There've been a few images of very light frost on the deck, but does anyone know if there are expected to be any images showing significant CO2 frost build-up on the arrays before it's "lights out". If so, when might that occur?

From the sunlight hours diagram from the last briefing, CO2 encasement begins around February 2, somewhere a little beyond sol 240. But, encasement is probably solid CO2 with no daily break, growing thicker each day.

Before that there'd be partial frosts that sublimated away during the day. University of Arizona Phoenix FAQ, probably written long ago, mentions CO2 frost:



So, maybe we'll see some just before the end. Probably all depends on how long she can last.

Edit: This by AJS Rayl, back in the sunny days of May, also says it will be close: Planetary News: Phoenix (2008):

Hey...looks like I have some dust in my eye...

Man...this leaves me with a knot on my throat...truly does...

Here in NE Florida I scraped water ice off my car windscreen this am. Was about 2 C air temp. Compared to -95 C that is not too bad.
I sure hope we see a thick ice covering near Phoenix.

This decision to stop the RA and TEGA heaters remindes me of a song of Smallfaces - All or nothing.

P.S. - hello all!

The happy place here is that she made it, she's performing brilliantly, and she's an unqualified success by any reasonable standard. Consider the alternative if any of the hundreds of fatal things that could have gone wrong did.

It'll hurt like hell to lose her, but so glad that we had her at all.

I know this might sound strange - almost heretical - coming from one of the Forum's most unashamedly romantic machine huggers, but I'm not feeling so distraught over Phoenix's demise. I read the report about the heaters being switched off and although I knew it represented the beginning of the end I couldn't help thinking "Well, fair enough..." I think maybe it's because, from the very start, it was made clear that she would almost certainly not survive to Christmas, it would just get too cold, too dark, too hostile for her to keep going. Or maybe it's because there's not a lot more science she can actually do now, not with power levels so low and all her ovens full or broken. I don't know. But in my mind Phoenix - unlike our seemingly immortal, Too Stubborn To Die rovers - has always been a butterfly: a delicate creature of elegant beauty that emerged from an ugly chrysalis, but was destined from the start to live a short, exciting life before fading away and dying.

I'll miss her when she's gone, too, but I'll always look back on her - and our - brief stay in Barsoom's arctic and smile.

Safe mode.

Planetary Society Weblog: Phoenix update: Entry into and exit from safe mode, no science for a few days' recharging



JPL Phoenix Mission News: Phoenix Mission Status Report (October 29)

Hang on in there, Phoenix...

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...and if you could teleport that stuff there, you would! Cool pic, Stu.

Mark Lemmon has deleted Sol 152 and Sol 153 from Phoenix SSI raw images directory. It's end ?

Maybe just 'cos there are no images planned for those sols... ?

Our bird's flames are dying down now though, that's for sure...

No, that was just clean up. The site will not be updated until new SSI data are expected, rather than cluttering it with sols of non-plans. So while the situation is grim and I cannot guarantee there will be more updates, there was no intent to signal the end. The engineering team is working hard. And even if all else fails, there's still a "test" of lazarus mode. The UA and NASA sites are a better way to get such news than trying to read between the lines elsewhere.

Thanks Deimos, I had hope that my assumption is erroneous. I have great hope that now, after the completion of work by RA and TEGA, the Happy Pan will be continued.
Greetings to the whole team. Thank you for everything you have already done.

Yeah, getting grim.

JPL Phoenix Mission News: Phoenix Mission Status Report (October 30)

I'll side with Stu on this one.

Sure, It'll be sad to see Phoenix go, but when it comes, it comes. We've all known it will die over the winter. Perhaps since we've always known that it'll die from the cold, we've all been preparing ourselves for the inevitable. And perhaps, the rovers are easier for us to identify with. Spirit and Opportunity look alive. The Pancam looks like eyes, the robotic arm is... an arm... and so on. We find it easier to sympathize with the MER rovers than we do a tabletop lander with a bunch of instruments on it. With MER, we can go out and explore, with Phoenix, we're stuck in one spot.

I'll be sad to see it go, but I won't shed a tear. When one of the MER's die, then I'll probably be a bit tearful.
My mother says that praying for a successful launch is silly, "It's just an inanimate object" she says.
Oh she has no idea...

> the wake-sleep cycling would have begun at an unknown time when batteries became depleted.

I find this surprising. As I recall, one of the reasons we lost contact [eventually forever] with Mars Pathfinder was because pathfinder's clock got off and earth had no idea when it was communicating. I believe there are other cases of lost space probes because out of out of sync clocks.

Not loosing track of time seems to be of utmost importance. A digital clock requires such miniscule amounts of power (think of those kid science kits where you power a digital clock by sticking wires into a potato) it seems like they would have had a separate power source for the clock for Phoenix (and all post Pathfinder missions). A single, tiny, buttoncell can power a digital clock for a decade!

If, instead, Phoenix still has a correct time reference, but the mode it has gone into was timed relative to when the 'batteries became depleted' that just seems like a silly software error. No matter when a fault happens, the space craft should always communicate at a deterministic time.

It can only do this if it has power to do so. And remember that Phoenix can only communicate when an orbiter is going overhead, which only happens four times per day for a few minutes each time. So communicating at a deterministic (Earth) time is not something that makes much sense in this case, without the lander remembering a lot more stuff than it would be a good idea for it to rely on to remember (like exactly when the passes are predicted to occur for a long time into the future.)

If you do things based on an absolute clock, they had better not fail if that clock goes nuts. It's easier to rely on things you can directly observe.

Too bad they didn't permanently park the arm twisting up one of the solar panels towards the sun...

Ah.... what we know is that that "inanimate object" is the incarnation of the dreams, and blood, and sweat, and tears, and years, of love and effort to create a machine to answer a tiny set of questions about this strange universe we find ourselves in.

These machines are at the foci of our yearning to know...

I will feel sad indeed when we no longer hear from Phoenix ..... but she and the mission team wrought every drab of data
they could... and she, like a mayfly, will have lived her life to the fullest.

Craig

Well said. I would add, one isn't really praying for the inanimate object; one is praying that human understanding may be allowed to advance.

The NASA Phoenix Twitter Feed is sounding sad but brave:

Man, wrapping up some of Phoenix's open-ended projects today nearly made me tear up... :\

Now I see well why with such dark flames
your eyes sparkled so often.
O eyes!
It was as if in one full glance
you could concentrate your entire power.
Yet I did not realize - because mists floated about me,
woven by blinding fate -
that this beam of light was ready to be sent home
to that place whence all beams come.
You would have told me with your brilliance:
we would gladly have stayed near you!
But it is refused by Fate.
Just look at us, for soon we will be far!
What to you are only eyes in these days -
in future nights shall be stars to us.

(translated from Friedrich Rueckert, as used in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder)

I know this probably sounds like a dumb question, but isn't there any way to put Phoenix into a state of hibernation and then wake it up when the Martian winter is over?

As I understand it, the extreme cold will physically break electrical circuits and kill batteries.
Phoenix will actually be encased in dry ice (frozen CO2).

.....however in the extremely unlikely event that Phoenix does survive it has something they call the Lazarus mode where it would signal its condition if it was still functioning when solar power levels rise next Martian spring.

I suppose the most likely positive result would be detecting a slight sign of life in Phoenix, but no sight, hearing, taste, smell, sense of touch or ability to move. Kind of a vegetative state.

Wired RIP @MarsPhoenix: The Twitter Epitaph Contest

Phoenix Lazarus mode worked and she was contacted successfully on Thursday evening, according to this article linked from the Phoenix twitter feed.

Stupid I know but I'm avoiding this thread...like if it would bring bad luck to our brave, beautiful bird...

Hang in there Phoenix!

I am really hoping that there some thicker frost deposits (a la Viking 2) that show up while SSI is still active. Might happen, might not.

Latest image of "Holy Cow" taken Oct. 18 (Sol 142)

Some filling in by the sand storm perhaps?

This is THE image showing the MAXIMUM 100% frost coverage seen by VL2 in 1979 (real colors).
This frost was able to stay during daylight hours, only because of extreme low temperatures encountered at her landing site :
- early morning at 06:00 : -122°C
- early afternoon at 15:00 : -92°C
I doubt (but still hope also) that the Phoenix lander will be able to live long enough and withstand such conditions to see such frost coverage...
Click to view attachment