The end seems to have finally come for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission at the planet’s north pole, scientists said Monday.
“At this time we’re pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use,” said Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“We knew this would happen eventually,” Goldstein added.
Mission controllers lost touch with the lander on Nov. 2. That “was actually the last time we actually heard form Phoenix,” Goldstein said. The spacecraft has been studying the arctic surface of the red planet for just over five months, since landing there May 25.
During the course of its mission, Phoenix scooped up samples of the Martian dirt and subsurface water ice at its arctic landing site and analyzed them for signs of the planet’s past potential habitability. Phoenix touched down on the northern plains of a region known as Vastitas Borealis. The area is at a latitude on Mars equivalent to northern Alaska on Earth.
Phoenix successfully completed its mission objectives at the end of its three-month primary mission in August. The mission’s cost was ultimately about $475 million (up from the $420 million for its original three-month mission).

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander weathered its first dust storm on the red planet this past weekend, though the dust did lower the lander’s solar power and put the brakes on some of its planned activities.
Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told reporters about the weekend’s events during a lecture discussing the mission at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Conference in here on Wednesday.
The nearly 23,000 square-mile (37,000 square-km) storm moved west to east around the northern arctic plains of Mars, and weakened considerably by the time it reached the lander on Saturday, Oct. 11. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the planet took a snapshot of the storm as it blew over Phoenix.
At the height of the storm, all the dust it had kicked up increased the opacity of the atmosphere over the spacecraft, letting less sunlight through to its solar arrays, the lander’s sole source of power.
Phoenix’s power levels “really dropped drastically,” Goldstein told SPACE.com.
The hit to the lander’s already diminishing power supplies limited what the spacecraft could do over the weekend.

After more than four months on the arctic plains of the red planet, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s days are finally numbered.As the sun begins to set for the frigid Martian winter, the spacecraft will lose its energy supply, freeze and eventually fall into a mechanical coma from which it will likely never wake up.
Phoenix’s mission has been to dig up samples of Martian dirt and the subsurface layer of rock-hard water ice at its landing site in Mars’ Vastitas Borealis plains. The lander has been scanning the samples for signs of the region’s past potential for habitability.
Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, late spring in the Martian northern hemisphere. The mission was originally slated to last three months, to the end of August, but was extended twice; first to the end of September and recently through the end of December.
But whether or not Phoenix will survive that long is uncertain and depends on how the spacecraft’s systems handle its ever-dwindling energy supply and the harsh conditions of the Martian winter.

NASA scientists hope to hear what it sounds like on the surface of Mars for the first time when they attempt to switch on the Phoenix Mars Lander’s microphone in the next week or two, mission leaders announced on Monday.
“This is definitely a first,” said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Phoenix’s microphone is a part of the Mars Descent Imager system that was included on the underside of the lander to take downward-looking images during the three minutes of descent before the spacecraft touched down on the planet’s surface. The MARDI on Phoenix was originally designed for the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander missions, which were eventually canceled. The system is also similar to the one aboard 1999’s ill-fated Mars Polar Lander.
The plan to use the imager and microphone on May 25 (when Phoenix landed) were scrapped when tests showed that using the system would create an unacceptable risk to a safe landing for Phoenix.

There’s a new Martian movie, though it’s not quite feature-length.
A series of still images taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander of water-ice clouds sailing overhead on the red planet has been turned into a short animation by NASA mission scientists.
“The images were taken as part of a campaign to see clouds and track wind. These are clearly ice clouds,” said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University and the lead scientist for the lander’s surface stereo imager, which snapped the pictures of the clouds during a 10-minute period on Aug. 29. The resulting animation is just a few seconds long.