During the first 90 Martian days, or sols, after its May 25 landing on an arctic plain of Mars, the Phoenix Mars Lander dug several trenches in the workspace reachable with the lander's robotic arm. The lander's Surface Stereo Imager camera recorded this view of the workspace on Sol 90, early afternoon local Mars time (overnight Aug. 25 to Aug. 26, 2008). The shadow of the camera itself, atop its mast, is just left of the center of the image and roughly a third of a meter (one foot) wide. The workspace is on the north side of the lander. The trench just to the right of center is called "Neverland." (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)
This artist's rendition shows the Phoenix Lander as it begins to shut down operations as winter sets in. No sun shines on Mars' far northern latitudes during winter. This marks the end of the mission because the solar panels can no longer charge the lander's batteries. As the atmosphere cools, frost will bury the lander in ice. (Artist: Corby Waste, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
William Hartmann, Alfred McEwen and Peter Smith (left to right) were panelists for National Public Radio's "Science Friday" broadcast live from the Phoenix Science Operations Center in September. Hartmann, an expert on Mars, is with the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute. McEwen, of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is principal investigator for HiRISE on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Smith, of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Mission. (William Holst, UA)
Mars has slipped far enough behind the sun today that signals from Mars-orbiting spacecraft are effectively blocked until mid-December. This solar conjunction happens every two years.
Mars mission scientists – including the University of Arizona-based team that runs the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – will resume operations three weeks from now.
But for NASA's UA-led Phoenix Mars Mission, the first university-led mission to Mars, surface science operations are over.
The champion little robot was to have photographed, dug and tested samples in the Martian arctic for 90 days after landing on May 25, 2008. Not only did the Phoenix Mars Lander achieve full mission success in August, it worked for a total 151 Martian days, until Oct. 27, when it was walloped by a dust storm that filled the sky with fine dust that persisted for days. Drained of battery power because too little sunlight reached its two solar panels, Phoenix successfully sent its last signal to the mission team on Sunday, Nov. 2.
"This has been a great experience in my life, not only for the wonderful science return but for the tremendous team work that we've developed over the years of the mission," Peter Smith of the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Phoenix principal investigator, said in a Nov. 10 media teleconference that announced Phoenix surface operations had ended. "It's been a great mission. It's been seven years of my life and definitely a major part of my science career. I'm just thrilled about what we've been able to do."
The UA led the $420 million Phoenix mission and $8 million mission extensions with project management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, and development partnership at Lockheed Martin Corp., Denver. International partners are the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagan and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College of London.
Running daily surface science operations was a full-time job, and mission scientists had no time to do related laboratory work or analyze their complicated data in depth. They're doing that now, and will report results in science papers to come. But they shared stunning scientific successes with the public as they happened. These include:
The UA won the 2007 and the 2008 Governor's Innovator of the Year Award in the academia category for leading the Phoenix mission. The mission also won Popular Mechanics magazine's 2008 Breakthrough Award for Innovation, the 2008 Civil Space Award from the California Space Authority, the 2008 National Space Club Astronautics Engineer Award and Popular Science magazine's 2008 Best of What's New Grand Award in the aviation and space category.
Phoenix Education and Public Outreach To Millions
Phoenix's education and public outreach, or EPO, team ran by far the most successful EPO program in Mars mission history, according to NASA.
For the past 26 months, the Phoenix EPO team has shared science and engineering aspects of mission with millions of schoolchildren and teachers, museum-goers and Internet users, said Phoenix EPO manager Carla Bitter. About 20,000 visited the Science Operations Center in small tour groups led by EPO team members.
By conservative count, somewhere between 50 million and 60 million people followed the Phoenix Mars Mission run from the UA this year, Bitter said.
On landing day alone, May 25, 2008, the UA's Phoenix Web site registered 6 million hits, plus another 1 to 2 million hits that went directly to raw lander image pages.
NASA tracks the statistics for its own, separate Phoenix Web site. The NASA site drew 20 million visitors on Phoenix landing weekend
By conservative estimate, between 6 million and 7 million unique visitors were drawn to UA's Phoenix Mission Web site during the 5-month mission. Numbers on "page hits" or "page views" run about five times higher. UA Phoenix Web pages were viewed about 28 million times between May 19, 2008, and Nov. 6, 2008.
Web traffic on the UA Phoenix site came from more than 224 nations and territories, with most coming from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.
Audiences during a 3-week period in September numbered more than 7 million, which included 3.5 million National Public Radio "Science Friday" listeners, 2.5 million Discovery Channel viewers and 250,000 who downloaded Phoenix podcasts. Another 400,000 visited UA and NASA Phoenix mission Web sites during a 2-week period in September, 38,000 picked up near-daily Phoenix lander updates from Twitter maintained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several thousand others faithfully subscribed to FaceBook.
Bitter said she credits EPO success to "being given a blank check for creativity from my boss (Smith), utilizing the incredible talent of a very young staff and taking advantage of Web-based technologies at a time when more people are accessing data online than ever before." Imaging specialists who worked to get images from the lander onto Phoenix Web sites as soon as they were returned to Earth were a big reason the mission was so popular, she added.
The Phoenix EPO team is preparing a final report summarizing the numbers of people who followed Phoenix during its exceptional year. Bitter called the numbers "astonishing."
