NASA's
Phoenix Mars Lander is clinging to life and communicating daily with mission
controllers though its power supply is quickly diminishing.
Phoenix has communicated with mission
scientists everyday since Oct. 30, when the spacecraft suddenly
went quiet after a drop in available power sent it into an inactive "safe
mode."
The
spacecraft is now in its sixth month on the Martian surface - double its
initial mission - since
landing on the red planet's arctic plains on May 25. Phoenix has been
scooping up samples of Martian dirt and the rock-hard, subsurface layer of
water ice at its landing site and analyzing them for signs of past potential
habitability.
Phoenix is nearing
the end of its mission as the fraction of the day the sun spends above the
horizon shrinks at its arctic landing site. Dust raised by a storm last week,
which contributed to Phoenix's shutdown, continues to block some of the little
sunlight reaching the spacecraft.
Information
received by NASA over the past weekend shows that Phoenix is running out of
power each afternoon or evening, but reawakening after its solar arrays catch
morning sunlight.
"This
is exactly the scenario we expected for the mission's final phase, though the
dust storm brought it a couple weeks sooner than we had hoped," said
Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, Calif. "We will be trying to gain some additional science
during however many days we have left. Any day could be our last."
Mission
engineers at JPL and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colo., are attempting this week to send commands to be stored in the Phoenix's flash memory
for science activities to be conducted when the lander wakes up each day.
"Weather
observations are our top priority now," said Phoenix Principal
Investigator Peter Smith. "If there's enough energy, we will try to get
readings from the conductivity probe that has been inserted into the soil, and
possibly some images to assess frost buildup."
Phoenix finished scooping
up dirt and ice samples late last month. The team filled one of the four
remaining unfilled ovens on the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer
(TEGA), which bakes the samples and analyzes their composition. Two more ovens
were closed without samples for background measurements and one was left
unfilled, Smith told SPACE.com in an email.
The team
tried to use the lander's robotic arm to push a sample that was stuck into the
wet chemistry lab, but it didn't go in, Smith wrote.
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