http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/

I can’t see anything there about it having stopped so I presume the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is still running. Certainly heard nothing to the contrary that I can recall.

Let’s hope the MRO is back operating again by then. It’s been in safe mode for a couple of weeks now.

Maybe check out their website :

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html

& the Mars Recconnaissance Orbiter’s Wikipedia page is pretty respectable too :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter

I wrote this (very) short story after the Pathfinder landing but looking at this now it seems it maybe even more fitting for the Phoenix mission. I hope y’all enjoy it – it was published in the Advertiser (Adelaide, South Oz) newspaper back in summer (ie. Dec.-Jan-ish) 1997 when I was a lot younger. I hope I’ve gotten better as a writer since – & fear I might’ve gone backwards!

***

Gentle Into the Orange Night :
By Steven C. Raine (a.k.a. StevoR here)

‘Do not go gentle into the good night
Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light’
- Dylan Thomas

1) Landing – Friday July 4, 1996 Anno Domini :

It comes from a wandering star, invading the salmon hued atmosphere like an unusually large meteor. It shoots across the sky, a trail like a spider’s silky rope bursts from it. This trail expands, becomes a parachute, catching the falling star while it still glows red hot. Unlike the usual specks of celestial dust, it’s descent is controlled by a tiny silicon chip brain, programmed five hundred million kilometres away.

It plummets, ever falling, like Milton’s Lucifer on his plunge to Hell. Then it is cloven in twain by those same far distant master’s silicon tabled decrees. The red hot casing that had carried it through the hottest part of the descent, plunges towards a fiery impact. The other section, an upturned bowl with parachutes attached, faces a gentler landing. Yet the invading objects transformations continue as it lowers, on a strong kevlar rope, a furled up construction, suspended like an spider on its silk thread. The probe sends an echoing RADAR shout to find its height above the local base level of this sea-less world of rusty frigid dust.

Ten seconds from the hard rocks of Ares Vallis, the airbags inflate, the crinkled suspended mass becoming a spherically buffered hedgehog cocooning its sensitive core. Four seconds later, retrorockets fire breaking its perilous fall. The cable severs, the bundle of oversized balloons dropping from the abandoned top section. They didn’t have far to fall, perhaps the height of a giant sequoia tree. The interplanetary voyager slams into the surface, bounces, rebounds, begins a violent trampoline ride, leaping repeatedly, each bounce lower until the astronomical journey rolls to a halt. The airbags gradually deflate, unveiling their precious cargo. The pyramidal structure unfolds like a flower. Large symmetrical petals open, the triumphant stamen-like spike of the radio mast prods up. The fallen craft forms a platform coloured photovoltaic black.

2) Endurance – July, 2, 1996 Anno Domini :

It remains, enshrouded by the sand that buried it, scarring and scratching before being blown away in an ageless cycle lacking all purpose. Since landing, many planet-encompassing sandstorms have flittered their way over the stationary craft. Sand dunes swallowed it then were shifted on. Amid the endless landscape, it endures, non functional, yet somehow admirable in its hardy refusal to be worn to sand.

The radio mast still stands, cracked, scarred, missing its uppermost tip, yet defiant. The solar cells have been dead for all but the shortest span of the millennia, but their matte black finish is dirtied not destroyed. The punctured, shredded plastic remains flapping in the thin chill carbon dioxide air. A golden ramp too edges out, unrolled like a red carpet for some vain dignitary.

No feet have strode upon it, merely the robotic tread of a tiny car whose wheel-tracks have long since vanished. That flat microwave-sized box-like remote venturer is still existent, if ravaged. Its treads are cracked and knocked akimbo, the axles snapped, and some of the gold wheels fallen from their places like massacred soldiers, cut from their parade lines. It sits apart, scarcely in sight of its carrier, forever marooned by flat batteries, it’s communications severed and never renewed.

Silence continues, as darkness falls. As they have always done the pale blue dot of the morning and evening star and its dim grey companion rise and set. As the roseate sky darkens, the stars trail along their paths. Eternal in their slow sweep across the heavens, yet on a larger scale evanescent, their courses wobbling over centuries so even the pole star switches identity in an unvarying, glacially paced routine. Below this panorama, the mindless wreckage waits for its organic masters to join it across the void. There comes forth .. nothing but eternity.

3) Discovery – 3,000,000,000,000 Anno Domini

The end of the Solar system’s existence nears for the yellow star is creeping brighter, redder and fractionally larger. Where once it lay upon an open russet plain, now it is fossilised in orange sandstone. Though warped and twisted it is still identifiable, despite the aeons, as a thing alien to this world. It’s form has been twisted by geologic forces, compacted, lithified and tilted under straining strata. It has spent several hundred thousand years covered by vast dune-fields, buried completely, frozen into rock. Then more tens of thousands of years deeply clutched, re-oriented within the groaning restless ground. Yet more thousands of years have passed since vaster storms, spawned by increased activity from an aged and slowly dying star, eroding the overburden to create the cliff wherein it is set, like a fly in amber.

Now it is minus mast and rover, a platform strangely bent and marked. An anomaly, detectable only by technology far superior to its original creators, sensors so refined that only the distant future could even have dreamt of them. Their light and gentle beams now unveil its scant remains.

Feet crunch towards it, surface dust is brushed away. Wonderingly they touch the artefact, struggle to make out faded marks that once were letters. There is no doubt as to what they have discovered. Awe sweeps faces protected from the fiery glare as they caress their precious find.

Their eyes turn upwards towards the evening star, a brilliant orange firestone against a rosy sky, the slowly broiling world third planet out from the alien Sun. In their gaze a mixture of joy, numinous realisation and sorrow. For they knew the engineers of this wondrous relic had come far along the path to the stars yet gone no further. And vision is misted over by purple tears.

The End. (Of this story anyhow – or a beginning perhaps?)

***

I suppose I could do a updated ‘Phoenix’ version if folks’d like! But not right now.

No, it is because in space, nothing can crystallise onto your solar panels.

In a vacuum, the only way to absorb or lose heat is by radiation. Certainly while near Earth, the heat from the sun can be a bit of a problem (which is why the Apollo capsules did a very slow roll as they travelled to the moon, to ensure that the heat influx from the sun was even over the whole surface). I don’t know what temperature was maintained by Phoenix while travelling to Mars, but it may well have been doing something similar.

In an atmosphere, however, heat can be transferred by conduction and convection very much more rapidly than by radiation. Also, the atmosphere has stuff that can crystallise out onto parts of the spacecraft. At Mars’s poles, this will be CO₂ frost. I have no idea if this will get heavy enough to damage the lander, but it can certainly prevent the solar panels from absorbing sunlight. Also, batteries exposed to extreme cold (it may be as low as -100 °C on the coldest nights) might not ever work again.