Final Attempts to Hear from Mars Phoenix Scheduled

From May 17 to 21, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will conduct a fourth and final campaign to check on whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has come back to life.

During that period, Odyssey will listen for a signal from Phoenix during 61 flights over the lander's site on far-northern Mars. The orbiter detected no transmission from the lander in earlier campaigns totaling 150 overflights in January, February and April.

In 2008, Phoenix completed its three-month mission studying Martian ice, soil and atmosphere. The lander worked for five months before reduced sunlight caused energy to become insufficient to keep the lander functioning. The solar-powered robot was not designed to survive through the dark and cold conditions of a Martian arctic winter. However, in case it did, NASA has used Odyssey to listen for the signals that Phoenix would transmit if abundant spring sunshine revived the lander.

Continued at link.

Wouldn't this be the perfect time for retrieval to be successful and we get some weird encrypted alien code like is suppose to be from voyager 2?

I hope we can get something back but Mars is pretty hostile so were lucky to have what we even do in pictures and information. We shall see.

It's good to know that -- even though it wasn't designed to last through the long, dark Polar winter -- someone at NASA still wants to try to contact it.

Who knows? Maybe the robustness of the spacecraft will surprise them...perhaps it will turn back on when the Sun finally shines long enough on those solar panels again. The Mars Exploration Rovers proved that they could be WAY more long-lived than how they were nominally designed. Although, of course, the rovers are near the equator -- with plenty more sunshine falling on the panels.

I'm interested to see if they hear anything from it. Keep me posted in case I miss it.

[edit on 5/14/2010 by Soylent Green Is People]