We’re able to see the lander in the images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter despite the low-light conditions and the reflective effects of the carbon dioxide frost. The HiRISE team did have to play around with the contrast and angles to get the image we see, but how many pictures pass without some sort of processing anyway.

Photos like this one are intended to help us understand the winter patterns and transitions of Mars better, but all I understand at the moment is need to drink a cup of hot chocolate on behalf of the Phoenix lander. [HiRISE via NASA]

Phoenix’s Instant Boot BIOS is UEFI based, which means it can turn on those devices simultaneously to hit that roughly one second mark. Regular BIOS types—used by most current notebooks—turn on devices one at a time. That’s why it takes up to 10 seconds before the operating system even gets the chance to load.

In this demo from the Intel Developer’s Forum, a Lenovo T400s boots a usable Windows 7 desktop in about 10 seconds. It’s also helped by a solid-state hard disk, and has a clean install without any crap-ware.

Phoenix says it can improve that time further with tweaks specific to individual laptops. It didn’t say if any big names had signed the tech up, but I’m thinking some will. Waiting for your laptop to load is an inconvenience we’ve learned to live with, but I’d pay a little extra to make it a thing of the past. What about you? [LAPTOP Magazine and GottaBeMobile]

It goes to show that the economy’s bad in space, too. But aside from budgetary overages, the MSL is one of the most advanced crafts ever to shoot for the red planet. It will be able to redirect its course late into the landing phase, and will actually touch down on a tether lowered from a hovering descent stage. On board will be the biggest science payload ever to hit Martian soil, which will study past signs of water in four potential landing sites. [NASA]

The Phoenix Lander Mission Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory–Chris Lewicki–said that they “were hoping that another variation in weather might give [them] an opportunity to contact the lander again.”

In other words: If the Phoenix’s hardware survives the extreme -100º C of the Martian winter, NASA controllers will keep trying in Spring. They will do it issuing commands from the two Mars orbiters, and wishing the probe has enough strength to restart. Hopefully, as there should always be one last chance for everything. [Aviation Week]

The story of Phoenix’s tweeting started when it became clear that the landing date–the most critical point of any mission–would be over Memorial Day weekend, when many American hit the road for beaches, barbecues and beer. McGregor realised that Twitter’s SMS updates may have been the perfect way to reach people interested in the mission via their phones when they weren’t in front of a TV or computer.

So a few weeks before Phoenix was scheduled to land on Mars, without thinking about it too much, Veronica started a Twitter page for the mission with a single tweet: “Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!” On top of reaching people’s phones, Twitter also seemed like the perfect way to get info out quickly and easily without having to deal with the typical NASA bureacracy that tended to bog down news blogs for past missions.

There was no publicity, no big media push to promote it–just a single announcement on a serious space geek forum, unmannedspaceflight.com. But the next day, over 3,000 people were following MarsPhoenix on Twitter. The day after that: 6,000. And after getting tossed around on the bigger Tweeters feeds, it was off.

“After that, I kind of had a “there goes my summer” moment.” Veronica remembers. “After we saw that everybody else was mentioning it, we thought ‘hey maybe we should put something on our homepage.’”

Two specifics of Twitter’s messaging format made Phoenix’s tweets take off. To fit into the 140 character max for each post, writing tweets in first-person quickly became the easiest way to squeeze in the most possible information.

Second is Twitter’s direct response feature, which allowed Veronica to answer submitted questions in the best way possible. Who wouldn’t want to receive a first-person tweet directly addressed to them?

Now with over 39,000 followers, with almost no one dropping the feed now that the mission is technically complete, MarsPhoenix is one of the biggest Tweeters in the history of the site. It no surprise, then, that Veronica has also been tweeting for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (although not in first person, as per the mission director) and plans to carry on in first person for the upcoming Mars Science Lab mission.

We here at Giz were honored to be the home for Phoenix’s final words, although sometimes it’s kind of a morale-killer: how could my posts ever possibly top a robot’s coming direct from Mars?

If you are reading this, then my mission is probably over.

This final entry is one that I asked be posted after my mission team announces they’ve lost contact with me. Today is that day and I must say good-bye, but I do it in triumph and not in grief.

As I’ve said before, there’s no other place I’d rather be than here. My mission lasted five months instead of three, and I’m content knowing that I worked hard and accomplished great things during that time. My work here is done, but I leave behind a legacy of images and data.

In that sense, you haven’t heard the end of me. Scientists will be releasing findings based on my data for months, possibly years, to come and today’s children will read of my discoveries in their textbooks. Engineers will use my experience during landing and surface operations to aid in designing future robotic missions.

But for now, it’s time for me to hunker down and brave what will be a long and cold autumn and winter. Temperatures should reach -199F (-128C) and a polar cap of carbon dioxide ice will envelop me in an icy tomb.

Seasons on Mars last about twice as long as seasons on Earth, so if you’re wondering when the next Martian spring in the northern hemisphere begins, it’s one Earth-year away–October 27, 2009. The next Martian summer solstice, when maximum sunlight would hit my solar arrays, falls on May 13, 2010.

That’s a long time away. And it’s one of the reasons there isn’t much hope that I’ll ever contact home again.

For my mission teams on Earth, I bid a special farewell and thank you. For the thousands of you who joined me on this journey with your correspondence, I will miss you dearly. I hope you’ll look to my kindred robotic explorers as they seek to further humankind’s quest to learn and understand our place in the universe. The rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (@MarsRovers), are still operating in their sun belt locations closer to the Martian equator; Cassini (@CassiniSaturn) is sailing around Saturn and its rings; and the Mars Science Laboratory (@MarsScienceLab)–the biggest rover ever built for launch to another planet–is being carefully pieced together for launch next year.

My mission team has promised to update my Twitter feed as more of my science discoveries are announced. If I’m lucky, perhaps one of the orbiters will snap a photo of me when spring comes around.

So long Earth. I’ll be here to greet the next explorers to arrive, be they robot or human.

It’s been a great pleasure to have Mars Phoenix guest blogging for us, reminiscing back on a successful mission. Just as Doug McCuistion from NASA said on the news conference today, it’s certainly more of an Irish wake than a funeral today. We’re drinking to you tonight, little buddy. You can see all of Phoenix’s previous entries and the official press release announcing the end of Phoenix’s mission.

As a polar explorer, my entire mission depended on ice. I was sent to Mars to find clues to the water history of Mars–data that would help determine whether the planet was ever hospitable to life–by studying its water ice. Without it, my mission would be toast, but in the end, it’s what will ultimately kill me.

Using data from the Odyssey orbiter, scientists predicted I’d land on top of subsurface ice, completely hidden from view below inches of red Martian topsoil. It would probably take a few to several days, maybe even weeks, of tireless digging with my robotic arm to find it. Or so they thought.

Before I could dig, I first had to check some blind spots around my base that were hidden from the view of my main camera. Engineers wanted the smaller camera on my robotic arm to check under the deck and around my footpads to be sure there weren’t any large rocks that could be an obstacle to the moving arm.

In one of the great serendipitous moments of the mission, my peek underneath showed solid patches of what appeared to be exposed ice. The blast of my retro rockets during landing had blown away the topsoil, revealing what I’d come for.

In the mission downlink room, where the teams gather to watch my images coming back, scientists and engineers did a double take at the computer screens. People jumped. Someone yelled “holy cow!” The phrase stuck and became the name for the patches.

It was only five days into the mission and already it was off to a wonderful start.

A few weeks later, with digging underway, scientists stared at their screens again when before-and-after images showed small chunks had disappeared from a trench. It was another sign they were waiting for. The vanishing act could only be explained as sublimation, the transformation of a solid to a vapor, and additional proof I’d uncovered ice.

By the end of my prime 90-day mission, I had found water ice under the surface, seasonal frost on the surface, water ice clouds in the sky and even falling water ice crystals. Yes, snow falling:

As my mission progressed into late summer, I saw a Martian sunset for the first time. It was a beautiful sight, but also a chilling one. Losing the midnight sun meant less energy for my solar panels. It also meant colder temperatures and eventually the need to run heaters to keep myself warm enough to survive. The combination of generating less power and needing more power to stay warm was expected – and deadly.

On the last day I conducted science, sol 151 (Oct 27), a perfect storm converged. A combination of ice clouds and a dust storm had darkened the sky, causing a dramatic drop in sunlight reaching my solar panels. As I worked to finish my final science operation of the day, power levels reached a critical point. To make matters worse, temperatures dropped to the lowest point of any time in the mission, and the heaters kicked in for the very first time. With that, my last bit of power drained away.
This is my “telltale” blowing in the storm’s strong winds.

Thankfully, my systems are built to automatically attempt to jumpstart my heart again, should my batteries begin to receive power again. This is my Lazurus mode (I’ve used up just about all of the life-after-death metaphors!). On a few recent days since the storm, my Lazarus mode has brought me back to life when sunlight hits my panels, giving me enough energy to send a beep to an orbiter before I lose power again. The cycle repeats and could go on for days. But it will have to stop, one day. And I fear that day is coming up sooner than later.

My instruments, including a miniature chemistry lab, an oven to bake samples and analyse their vapours, an optical and an atomic force microscope, a laser (which discovered the snow), and a weather station worked valiantly throughout the mission and sent back enough data to keep the scientists busy for months, if not years, to come. My scientific work here may be done, but I’m still alive. And my story on Mars is far from finished.

You can find Phoenix Lander’s previous Giz entries here and its Twitter feed here.

Just over five months ago, on May 25, I was zooming along toward the Red Planet with nothing more than a dream and a lot of butterflies in my stomach.

At mission control at JPL, it was do or die time. It was a tough moment for the team, knowing that the whole world was watching and by the end of the day they’d be heroes or zeros. In a short window of seven minutes, the time it takes to go from atmospheric entry to touchdown, all their work of the previous years was put on the line. Around mission control, this phase of entry, descent and landing was affectionately known as the “seven minutes of terror.” And that was just for the guys on the ground–imagine what it was like for me!

And because it would take over 15 minutes for my signal, travelling at the speed of light, to make the trip from Mars to Earth, my landing would be over before my team knew if it had started.

At 4:46 p.m. (PDT), the first indication that I had entered the Martian atmosphere was received in mission control. For the next seven tense minutes, the team watched. There was nothing more they could do but hope that hundreds of pre-programmed commands would execute correctly.

In the end, my arrival to Mars went better than anyone had hoped. Not only did I do a perfect landing, but also my signal came through loud and clear from the start of atmospheric entry all the way to the ground.

One phase of my mission had ended and a new phase was beginning. It was time to open my eyes, look out across the Martian horizon, and pray I’d landed within reach of ice.

While I’ve spent my entire mission talking to followers via Twitter, some things just can’t be said in 140 characters or less. So I was thrilled when the editors of Gizmodo asked if I would contribute as a guest blogger, and even more thrilled when they said I could write more than two sentences at a time.

One of the most common questions I’m asked, and one of the most difficult to explain, is whether I knew going in that this mission would cost me my life. The answer to that is yes, of course, and there’s not a single robotic explorer in our solar system that doesn’t know it faces the same fate. Unlike all of you, most of us can’t go home again.

Perhaps what troubles people most is that my mission will come to an end so soon. They want to know what it is the long-lasting Mars rovers have that I don’t? Just like the rovers, I set out on a mission expected to last a mere 90 days. I’ve outlived my warranty and lasted five months, but those plucky rovers have lasted nearly five years (with no end in sight).

What the rovers have that I don’t is sunlight and plenty of it. They’re on opposite sides of the planet from each other and located close enough to the Martian equator to ensure they get a good dose of sunshine every day (um, sol) of the year.

And sun equals life when you’re a solar powered robot.

I’m located in the far north, above the Martian arctic circle. When I landed at the start of summer, this was the land of the midnight sun. But summer is giving way to autumn and now the sun dips below the horizon for longer periods of time each day. Right now, the sun dips below the horizon for seven hours a day, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m in total darkness. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the temperatures here will drop to -180F, low enough to destroy circuit boards and crack my solar arrays.

“But your name is Phoenix!” some say. “That means you’ll come back to life, right?”

Many people don’t know that the name “Phoenix” was bestowed on me the first time I came back to life. That was in 2003, when NASA decided to pull me out of storage and prepare me for my current mission. I was sitting in storage because my original mission—a flight to Mars in 2001—was cancelled after a 1999 mission was lost during landing.

At the time, I was half-built and under the guidance of Ed Sedivy, a spacecraft manager at Lockheed Martin. Ed, as you can imagine, wasn’t thrilled to learn his spacecraft had been cancelled, but he understood NASA hesitance in going forward with a mission that had similarities to the ‘99 mission. Ed moved on to manage other spacecraft for Lockheed Martin, but he didn’t forget I was there.

In 2002, something wonderful happened. An instrument on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, an orbiter, detected a lot of “H.” That’s H as in hydrogen—the H of H2O—sitting there under the Martian surface. “I was blown away by the data,” said Bill Boynton, the lead scientist, at a press conference to announce the finding. “This is really amazing. This is the best direct evidence we have of subsurface water ice on Mars.”

That discovery got a lot of scientists thinking. One of them, Peter Smith, wanted to reach out and touch that ice. And Peter knew about a half-built spacecraft sitting in storage in Denver that just happened to have the right stuff, including a 7.7-foot robotic arm. Peter, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, proposed that I be taken out of storage and sent to touch that ice. He even came up with an appropriate name for a spacecraft that was getting a second chance. He called me Phoenix.

Pulling me out of storage didn’t immediately bring me to life. No, there was plenty of work to do first. A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was given the ulcer-inducing responsibility to make sure that whatever doomed the ‘99 mission wouldn’t happen again. Barry Goldstein, fresh from his work on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, was appointed to lead the JPL team.

Barry and his team at JPL, along with Ed and his team at Lockheed Martin, began to take apart, test, and examine every system. They were on a quest to locate anything that could fail because when it comes to landing, just one mistake can end a mission. They started out with one suspected culprit—the retro rockets used during landing—but in the end they found and fixed over one dozen issues that could have led to some pretty dire consequences I’d rather not think about.

So in that sense I arose from the ashes back in 2003 when I began my current trek to Mars. When people ask if I knew going in that I’d eventually become a frozen fixture on the Red Planet, the answer is yes, and it’s a heck of a better place to be than locked in storage.

• Phoenix Mars Lander Looks Back on its Re-Birth