NASA loses contact with Mars lander, ends mission

by Amitjha | November 10, 2008 at 09:30 pm

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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface. The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet's soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix's cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.

The Phoenix Mars Lander, which made history by finding definitive proof of water on the Red Planet, has lost contact with Earth, effectively ending its more than five-month mission, NASA said on Monday.

The robotic probe had been expected to stop communicating with its Earth-bound handlers as it slowly froze to death with the onset of Martian winter, but its sudden end came after a dust storm cut off even more energy-giving sunlight from the spacecraft.

Phoenix, which touched down at the north pole of Mars in late May, transmitted its last signal to Earth on November 2 and project scientists said they would try for three more weeks to contact the lander, but considered the $475 million mission essentially over.

"We are actually ceasing operations, declaring an end to operations at this point," Barry Goldstein, Phoenix mission project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters at a briefing.

"We'll constantly turn on the radio and try to hail Phoenix and see if it's alive, but at this point nobody on the team has any expectations of that happening," he said.

Conceived in 2002 and launched in August 2007, the spacecraft touched down on May 25 on a frozen Martian desert to search for water and assess conditions for the possibility of sustaining life.