It was a sad, but not unexpected death. There were predictions that  
she would be encased in ice and snow in the coming winter, even if she  
somehow had enough energy to communicate.  It seems tougher because  
all the other recent Mars landers were in temperate zones and were  
able to roll around and become positioned so as to escape winter  
death. Phoenix was sent to the arctic with flat feet, and so was  
doomed from design onward. The most amazing thing to me is that she  
was made from parts leftover from an abandoned project years ago. That  
one would have crashed from all the errors found in it during the re- 
vamp. She shouldn't have flown at all, would have crashed if she had  
tried at first, yet ended up getting t to Mars for a magnificent job.

What's kind of creepy is the realization as that I, as a researcher,  
only have a finite number of experiments in me, too. I think I'll go  
seal up my windows a bit better. :-)

Alicia


On Nov 10, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Pat Rapp wrote:

> I know several people on this list were facebook friends with  
> Phoenix. She apparently did not survive the onset of the cold  
> Martian winter. She did, however, get more done in the past few  
> months than most of us do in a human lifetime.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7721032.stm
>
>
> >


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