Yeah, getting grim.

JPL Phoenix Mission News: Phoenix Mission Status Report (October 30)

I'll side with Stu on this one.

Sure, It'll be sad to see Phoenix go, but when it comes, it comes. We've all known it will die over the winter. Perhaps since we've always known that it'll die from the cold, we've all been preparing ourselves for the inevitable. And perhaps, the rovers are easier for us to identify with. Spirit and Opportunity look alive. The Pancam looks like eyes, the robotic arm is... an arm... and so on. We find it easier to sympathize with the MER rovers than we do a tabletop lander with a bunch of instruments on it. With MER, we can go out and explore, with Phoenix, we're stuck in one spot.

I'll be sad to see it go, but I won't shed a tear. When one of the MER's die, then I'll probably be a bit tearful.
My mother says that praying for a successful launch is silly, "It's just an inanimate object" she says.
Oh she has no idea...

> the wake-sleep cycling would have begun at an unknown time when batteries became depleted.

I find this surprising. As I recall, one of the reasons we lost contact [eventually forever] with Mars Pathfinder was because pathfinder's clock got off and earth had no idea when it was communicating. I believe there are other cases of lost space probes because out of out of sync clocks.

Not loosing track of time seems to be of utmost importance. A digital clock requires such miniscule amounts of power (think of those kid science kits where you power a digital clock by sticking wires into a potato) it seems like they would have had a separate power source for the clock for Phoenix (and all post Pathfinder missions). A single, tiny, buttoncell can power a digital clock for a decade!

If, instead, Phoenix still has a correct time reference, but the mode it has gone into was timed relative to when the 'batteries became depleted' that just seems like a silly software error. No matter when a fault happens, the space craft should always communicate at a deterministic time.

It can only do this if it has power to do so. And remember that Phoenix can only communicate when an orbiter is going overhead, which only happens four times per day for a few minutes each time. So communicating at a deterministic (Earth) time is not something that makes much sense in this case, without the lander remembering a lot more stuff than it would be a good idea for it to rely on to remember (like exactly when the passes are predicted to occur for a long time into the future.)

If you do things based on an absolute clock, they had better not fail if that clock goes nuts. It's easier to rely on things you can directly observe.

Too bad they didn't permanently park the arm twisting up one of the solar panels towards the sun...

Ah.... what we know is that that "inanimate object" is the incarnation of the dreams, and blood, and sweat, and tears, and years, of love and effort to create a machine to answer a tiny set of questions about this strange universe we find ourselves in.

These machines are at the foci of our yearning to know...

I will feel sad indeed when we no longer hear from Phoenix ..... but she and the mission team wrought every drab of data
they could... and she, like a mayfly, will have lived her life to the fullest.

Craig

Well said. I would add, one isn't really praying for the inanimate object; one is praying that human understanding may be allowed to advance.

The NASA Phoenix Twitter Feed is sounding sad but brave:

Man, wrapping up some of Phoenix's open-ended projects today nearly made me tear up... :\

Now I see well why with such dark flames
your eyes sparkled so often.
O eyes!
It was as if in one full glance
you could concentrate your entire power.
Yet I did not realize - because mists floated about me,
woven by blinding fate -
that this beam of light was ready to be sent home
to that place whence all beams come.
You would have told me with your brilliance:
we would gladly have stayed near you!
But it is refused by Fate.
Just look at us, for soon we will be far!
What to you are only eyes in these days -
in future nights shall be stars to us.

(translated from Friedrich Rueckert, as used in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder)

I know this probably sounds like a dumb question, but isn't there any way to put Phoenix into a state of hibernation and then wake it up when the Martian winter is over?

As I understand it, the extreme cold will physically break electrical circuits and kill batteries.
Phoenix will actually be encased in dry ice (frozen CO2).

.....however in the extremely unlikely event that Phoenix does survive it has something they call the Lazarus mode where it would signal its condition if it was still functioning when solar power levels rise next Martian spring.

I suppose the most likely positive result would be detecting a slight sign of life in Phoenix, but no sight, hearing, taste, smell, sense of touch or ability to move. Kind of a vegetative state.

Wired RIP @MarsPhoenix: The Twitter Epitaph Contest