LAST DAY OF PHOENIX

Nov.2nd 2008, this is the last day when Nasa recieved signals from it's spacecraft on mars.. The phoenix spacecraft was launched on 4th august 2007. By travelling continuously for nine months,this spacecraft arrived in mars orbit.. The terror--- EDL or entry,descent and landing was performed exceptional by this spacecraft. On 25th may 2008, or 26th may 2008 for GMT+ citizens, phoenix succesfully landed on mars. The spacecraft started its work by digging the martian soil. later it started analyzing the weather and capturing images. the place where phoenix landed can be compared with the arctic region of earth. Designed to work for 3months, this spacecraft gave an extraordinary performance of 5months. Phoenix mission was acoomplished as it was basically targeted to find ice on the mars.later on after digging the soil,it discovered ice on mars. It took more than 25000 images of mars. it studied about the climate of mars. Dust storms were there near phoenix.. As, winters are approaching on mars, the sunlight is decreasing.. This spacecraft could have worked in this little sunlight but because of dust storms, it is unable. As there are no means of generating electricity from coal,water or other sources sunlight becomes the only source of charging batteries/generating electricity... All the instrumets aboard this spacecraft run on batteries that are charged from sunlight. But these batteries are not getting charged so phoenix ceased communications with earth.The temperature on mars in winters can be upto -87C. this is the lowest temperature recorded there. The q. that must be coming in mind must be that if there are winters on mars then after some time there will be summer and sufficient sunlight. so phoenix can again start working. But the max.temp recorded is about -5 C and usually it is -46C. in this temperature with no sufficient power, the instruments aboard the spacecraft which are directly exposed to martian atmosphere will get freezed and with no enough maximum temperature, this instruments can hardly function back!!!!!!!! SO we can call it as a Successful mission end. and can say phoenix has hibernated permenantly rather than calling its death. This Euphemism <> gives us idea that phoenix has done its job and is now resting.. "Phoenix not only met the tremendous challenge of landing safely, it accomplished scientific investigations on 149 of its 152 Martian days as a result of dedicated work by a talented team," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Phoenix findings also support the goal of learning the history of water on Mars. These findings include excavating soil above the ice table, revealing at least two distinct types of ice deposits; observing snow descending from clouds; providing a mission-long weather record, with data on temperature, pressure, humidity and wind; observations of haze, clouds, frost and whirlwinds; and coordinating with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to perform simultaneous ground and orbital observations of Martian weather.

by-

Akshay