With a name like “Phoenix” how can you count it out?

Mission managers for the Phoenix Mars lander said that after a week of no response from the lander, the Phoenix was probably defunct. The orbiting spacecraft will continue to listen for a few more weeks, but expectations are that the lander is permanently silent.

However, come next Martian spring, NASA will try to revive the Phoenix again, but according to an article in the NYTimes, “…the expectation is that the spacecraft’s electronics will not survive the long, deep freeze.”

How likely is it that Phoenix will rise from the ashes of a Martian winter? In last June’s post on this topic, Really low temperatures for a lithium ion battery,   Bill Yalen, lead project engineer with Yardney Technical Products, the manufacturer of the Phoenix’s lithium ion battery pack, said    “We have hard-frozen Li-ion cells in the past and verified that they could be thawed and recover. To do that, however, they should be at medium state of charge, whereas the Phoenix battery would presumably have discharged deeply due to lack of solar power…[italics added].”

According to the article, the Phoenix experienced this discharged-battery scenario: “…on Oct. 27, just after Phoenix finished its last major experiment analyzing Martian soil, an unexpected dust storm hit. The batteries, already low from running the experiment, ran out of energy. The spacecraft first put itself into a low-energy “safe mode,” then fell silent. It revived itself on Oct. 30, but, with the dust still swirling, was never able to fully recharge its batteries. Each day, the solar panels would generate enough electricity for the spacecraft to wake up, but then the batteries drained again."

Hope springs eternal, but the odds of the Phoenix rising for the next Martian spring don’t look so good.

Here are the links to the PowerSource three-part series on the Phoenix:

Power on Mars Part 1: Dust devils clean up solar arrays

Power on Mars Part 2: The likelihood of Phoenix rising from the frozen ashes

Power on Mars Part 3: *Really* low temperatures for a lithium ion battery