NASA will attempt to reestablish contact with the Mars Phoenix Lander on Monday.
The Mars Odyssey orbiter will pass over the lander's position (highlighted in the image above) 10 times a day for three straight days, listening for any sign that the craft survived the Martian winter's freezing temperatures.
Phoenix's electronics weren't designed to live through the period, so NASA officials aren't hopeful that they'll hear anything.
"We do not expect Phoenix to have survived, and therefore do not expect to hear from it. However, if Phoenix is transmitting, Odyssey will hear it," said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. "We will perform a sufficient number of Odyssey contact attempts that if we don't detect a transmission from Phoenix, we can have a high degree of confidence that the lander is not active."
In the unlikely case the Phoenix rises from the ashes frost, it is programmed to use the electricity generated by its solar panels to attempt communication with Odyssey or the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It would cycle through its communication tools, trying out its two radios and two antennas.
Mars Phoenix (aka @MarsPhoenix) was a wildly popular robotic lander that operated on the surface of the Red Planet for five months until November 2008 when its solar panels stopped receiving enough energy to keep it working. Since then, it's been through the Martian winter and part of the spring. The amount of solar energy hitting its high-latitude location is now roughly the same as it was when it shut down.
If Odyssey doesn't hear anything next week, further attempts to establish contact with Phoenix will come in February or March, when Odyssey will actively try to transmit radio signals to the lander instead of just listening.
We imagine the message will be something like, "Hey, little buddy, you there?"
In the meantime, we can only assume that Mars Phoenix is gone, but not forgotten. As the first NASA mission to make meaningful use of Twitter to engage the public, the craft earned a special, sub-140 character epitaph in our [Twitter Epitaph Contest](https://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/rip-mars-phoeni/): Veni, vidi, fodi. (I came, I saw, I dug)
See Also:
- Mars Phoenix Tweets: “We Have ICE!”
- Mars Phoenix “Shovel” Hits Hard White Layer Just Below Surface ...
- R.I.P. @MarsPhoenix: The Twitter Epitaph Contest
- The Dirt on Mars Phoenix Lander Contamination
- Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice
- Mars Phoenix Rasp Shreds Tough Martian Ice
- Interactive Timeline: Mars Phoenix Heads Into Extra Innings ...
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.**
