The end seems to have finally come for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission at the planet's north pole, scientists said Monday. "At this time we're pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use," said Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We knew this would happen eventually," Goldstein added. Mission controllers lost touch with the lander on Nov. 2. That "was actually the last time we actually heard form Phoenix," Goldstein said. The spacecraft has been studying the arctic surface of the red planet for just over five months, since landing there May 25. During the course of its mission, Phoenix scooped up samples of the Martian dirt and subsurface water ice at its arctic landing site and analyzed them for signs of the planet's past potential habitability. Phoenix touched down on the northern plains of a region known as Vastitas Borealis. The area is at a latitude on Mars equivalent to northern Alaska on Earth. Phoenix successfully completed its mission objectives at the end of its three-month primary mission in August. The mission's cost was ultimately about $475 million (up from the $420 million for its original three-month mission).

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander weathered its first dust storm on the red planet this past weekend, though the dust did lower the lander's solar power and put the brakes on some of its planned activities. Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told reporters about the weekend's events during a lecture discussing the mission at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Conference in here on Wednesday. The nearly 23,000 square-mile (37,000 square-km) storm moved west to east around the northern arctic plains of Mars, and weakened considerably by the time it reached the lander on Saturday, Oct. 11. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the planet took a snapshot of the storm as it blew over Phoenix. At the height of the storm, all the dust it had kicked up increased the opacity of the atmosphere over the spacecraft, letting less sunlight through to its solar arrays, the lander's sole source of power. Phoenix's power levels "really dropped drastically," Goldstein told SPACE.com. The hit to the lander's already diminishing power supplies limited what the spacecraft could do over the weekend.

After more than four months on the arctic plains of the red planet, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's days are finally numbered.As the sun begins to set for the frigid Martian winter, the spacecraft will lose its energy supply, freeze and eventually fall into a mechanical coma from which it will likely never wake up. Phoenix's mission has been to dig up samples of Martian dirt and the subsurface layer of rock-hard water ice at its landing site in Mars' Vastitas Borealis plains. The lander has been scanning the samples for signs of the region's past potential for habitability. Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, late spring in the Martian northern hemisphere. The mission was originally slated to last three months, to the end of August, but was extended twice; first to the end of September and recently through the end of December. But whether or not Phoenix will survive that long is uncertain and depends on how the spacecraft's systems handle its ever-dwindling energy supply and the harsh conditions of the Martian winter.

NASA scientists hope to hear what it sounds like on the surface of Mars for the first time when they attempt to switch on the Phoenix Mars Lander's microphone in the next week or two, mission leaders announced on Monday. "This is definitely a first," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Phoenix's microphone is a part of the Mars Descent Imager system that was included on the underside of the lander to take downward-looking images during the three minutes of descent before the spacecraft touched down on the planet's surface. The MARDI on Phoenix was originally designed for the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander missions, which were eventually canceled. The system is also similar to the one aboard 1999's ill-fated Mars Polar Lander. The plan to use the imager and microphone on May 25 (when Phoenix landed) were scrapped when tests showed that using the system would create an unacceptable risk to a safe landing for Phoenix.

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday. Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate. But exactly how that happened remains a mystery. "It's really kind of all up in the air," said William Boynton, a mission scientist at the University of Arizona at Tucson. A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.

Listen up…to Mars! Word from the trenches is that the Phoenix lander team is going forward with turning on the spacecraft’s microphone. Phoenix, like the lost-to-Mars 1999 Polar Lander, carried a tiny microphone to hear the sounds of the descent to the red planet. The microphone is part of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) system built by Malin Space Science Systems, but for Phoenix was turned off due to the small risk that it could trip up a critical landing system. But the go-ahead has been given to turn the microphone on, right there on-the-spot at the Phoenix Martian polar north landing spot. Other good news is that NASA has given the lander an extended lease on life for an additional two months - into November.

A fork-like conductivity probe has sensed humidity rising and falling beside NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, but when stuck into the ground, its measurements so far indicate soil that is thoroughly and perplexingly dry. "If you have water vapor in the air, every surface exposed to that air will have water molecules adhere to it that are somewhat mobile, even at temperatures well below freezing," said Aaron Zent of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., lead scientist for Phoenix's thermal and electroconductivity probe. In below-freezing permafrost terrains on Earth, that thin layer of unfrozen water molecules on soil particles can grow thick enough to support microbial life. One goal for building the conductivity probe and sending it to Mars has been to see whether the permafrost terrain of the Martian arctic has detectable thin films of unfrozen water on soil particles. By gauging how electricity moves through the soil from one prong to another, the probe can detect films of water barely more than one molecule thick.

There's a new Martian movie, though it's not quite feature-length. A series of still images taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander of water-ice clouds sailing overhead on the red planet has been turned into a short animation by NASA mission scientists. "The images were taken as part of a campaign to see clouds and track wind. These are clearly ice clouds," said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University and the lead scientist for the lander's surface stereo imager, which snapped the pictures of the clouds during a 10-minute period on Aug. 29. The resulting animation is just a few seconds long.

A thin layer of water frost is visible on the ground around NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander in this image taken by the Surface Stereo Imager at 6 a.m. on Sol 79 (August 14, 2008), the 79th Martian day after landing. The frost began to disappear shortly after 6 a.m. as the sun rose on the Phoenix landing site. The sun was about 22 degrees above the horizon when the image was taken, enhancing the detail of the polygons, troughs and rocks around the landing site. This view looks east-southeast with the lander’s eastern solar panel visible in the bottom left-hand corner of the image. This false color image has been enhanced to show color variations.

The unanticipated discovery of a mineral in Mars’ arctic soil doesn’t rule out the possibility that the red planet could support life, scientists with the Phoenix lander said today. While cautioning that the discovery of perchlorate, an oxidizing agent found in rocket fuel, still had to be confirmed by more experiments, scientists with the UA-led Phoenix Mars Mission rejected speculation that the mineral’s presence killed the possibility of life on the planet. “These compounds are quite stable and don’t destroy organic compounds,” said Peter Smith, the UA’s lead scientist for the mission. “This is an important piece in the puzzle and it is neither good nor bad for life.” While perchlorate can be hazardous to some life forms on Earth, others use the molecules for life, including in remote arid desert regions. “The interesting thing is perchlorate is a relatively inert oxidant,” said Richard Quinn, a mission scientist. “There are some microbes that use it as an energy source.”

NASA's Phoenix lander has discovered a toxic chemical in soil near Mars' north pole, dimming hopes for finding life on the Red Planet, the probe's operators said Monday. The chemical, perchlorate, is an oxidant widely used in solid rocket fuel. Researchers are still puzzling over the results and checking to make sure the perchlorate wasn't carried to Mars from Earth, the University of Arizona-based science team said. "While we have not completed our process on these soil samples, we have very interesting intermediate results," Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the project, said in a written statement. Early readings from a device aboard Phoenix called the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, "suggested Earth-like soil," Smith said. "Further analysis has revealed un-Earthlike aspects of the soil chemistry," he said. The Phoenix team has scheduled a teleconference for Tuesday to discuss the findings.

Could the Mars Phoenix lander have been contaminated by bacteria from Earth? The possibility was raised by rumor-multipliers feasting on an Aviation Week report that the White House had been briefed on "major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the 'potential for life' on Mars." The report has since been retracted, but it raised the prospect, if only wildly, that the Phoenix found Martian soil so habitable because transplanted microbes flourished there. But that, say researchers, is highly unlikely. Mars explorers have a profound self-interest in ensuring that bacterial hitchhikers don't confound their results: imagine asking for NASA funding after claiming a plucky strain of underarm bacteria as extraterrestrial life. And if Earthly bacteria survives a trip and then flourishes, it could upset an alien ecosystem -- the equivalent of finding something rare and priceless by stepping on it.

The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the "potential for life" on Mars, scientists tell Aviation Week & Space Technology. Sources say the new data do not indicate the discovery of existing or past life on Mars. Rather the data relate to habitability--the "potential" for Mars to support life--at the Phoenix arctic landing site, sources say. The data are much more complex than results related NASA's July 31 announcement that Phoenix has confirmed the presence of water ice at the site.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars. Mission scientists celebrated the news after a sample of the ice was finally delivered to one of the lander's instruments. Phoenix's mission has also officially been extended for one month beyond its original mission, NASA announced today at a briefing at the University of Arizona at Tucson, where mission control is currently based. "I'm very happy to announce that we've gotten an ice sample," said the University of Arizona's William Boynton, co-investigator for Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), which heats up samples and analyzes the vapors they give off to determine their composition. "We have water," Boynton added. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

Scientists and engineers on NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission spent the weekend examining how the icy soil on Mars interacts with the scoop on the lander's robotic arm, while trying different techniques to deliver a sample to one of the instruments. "It has really been a science experiment just learning how to interact with the icy soil on Mars – how it reacts with the scoop, its stickiness, whether it's better to have it in the shade or the sunlight," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of The University of Arizona.