29-October-2009, 04:42 AM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 13,461
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 01101001
I was just wondering what things might be like for Phoenix now. It's been several Earth-months of Autumn for Phoenix now, since December 26, and the CO2 encasement has been underway for about 8 weeks. All-sol darkness begins around now. Winter starts May 22, and Spring October 27. Poor baby.
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Ah. Spring!
Planetary Society Blog: HiRISE sees Phoenix in the Martian spring
Quote:
Before you look at the photos too closely, let me caution you against overinterpreting them. There's a lot of light areas and dark areas. Light areas could possibly be frost, but realize that the lighting geometry in this image is really extreme: the Sun had only crawled to one degree above the horizon when HiRISE snapped these photos. (I feel I should pause here to recognize how awesome it is that HiRISE even managed to get images showing anything intelligible under such low light.)
[...]
Phoenix is clearly still where we left it. It's impossible to say anything about what condition its solar panels are in. I'm not sure if higher-sun HiRISE images would be able to tell us whether the panels are intact, but I am sure that the images we have aren't sufficient to determine that. Unfortunately, we won't know for sure what higher-sun images might tell us until and unless they manage to get Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter back out of safe mode and doing science again.
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Ice encasement ends around November 20.
Quote:
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According to the Phoenix Twitter feed, it will be at least January before there will be enough hours of sunlight in the day to provide enough power for Phoenix to boot up again.
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