It seems pretty unlikely to happen, but starting on January 18 the Mars Odyssey Orbiter will begin listening for signals from the Phoenix. The mission ended last November as the Sun became too dim to continue to provide the solar cells enough energy to keep Phoenix warm and operable. The lander was never intended to survive a Martian winter and has most likely been devastated by the extremes and unlike the rovers, Phoenix is in a polar region which makes those extremities of a Martian winter even greater. Now with the end of Martian winter comes the addition of more sunlight, comparable warmth and therefore a reason to think maybe we can grab enough power to wake up and resume operations. So nobody really expects a technical miracle to take place this week, but in the unlikely event that the lander has survived… the science teams already have a plan in place to take that advantage.

Above is an impressive mosaic image of the frozen water that was found beneath the lander later in the mission. It is thought that the thrusters (which enable a soft surface landing) kicked away the top soil on the way down, revealing a sheet of frozen ice water right underneath the lander’s feet.

This is so nice, but I am furious that I didn’t get to design this. This is Information design at it’s best naturally by National Geographic. You can see 50 years of robotic planetary exploration at a glance. It even includes failed missions represented by darker desaturated lines. As far as I can tell the cream colored lines are US and the red ones are Soviet. Interesting to see how many of those lines go dark around Mars.

Now where does one purchase such a thing? Perhaps this month’s issue of NG? Here is the link to it on their site complete with zoom viewer and them some kind samaritan posted a hires version to flickr.

Not to re-post old material, but our iPhone planetary skins were recently posted to fuelyourcreativity.com for free download. So I thought I would just remind everyone and maybe direct a little traffic love their way. 

Better than the previous images seen here and here. this is a more recent view of the now defunct Mars Phoenix lander. Some nice detail in this considering how far away in orbit the MRO was when it was taken.

Nice full color image of Deimos, Mars’s smaller of two moons. There is a second one as well if you go to the NASA site and check out the hi-res link. I would say that this is now the definitive best image yet aquired of this body to date.

Taken by ESA’s Mars Express mission currently in orbit around Mars. It was actually aquired a while back last year.

One of the nicest panoramas in a while. See the planetary blog for more.

A Martian dust devil… or at this size, a tornado. We have seen these at much smaller scales from the rovers on the ground, but it would be exciting to see one of this size from the ground. This image was returned from the Mars Recon Orbiter from almost directly above and this spiral probably measures about 30km wide for an idea of scale.

The most common force for change on Mars is wind. Dust-devils and dust storms are quite common and they result in patterns and textures as seen here. Making this image even more interesting is the frost developing on one side of these dunes as the Martian winter takes hold.

The Ganges Chasma is a side canyon at one end of the vast Valles Marineris trough system of Mars. This image was returned by ESA’s Mars Express, brought to our attention by Bill Dunford’s Riding with Robots. The image above is a 2560×1800 wallpaper. Download the 1440×900 here.

On the Phoenix Mission’s 152nd Sol (a Martian day) the lander has fallen silent and mission engineers have been unable to communicate with it for over a week. This was expected as the Martian sunlight is less and less as the season changes. The sun is simply not providing enough energy to replenish its solar batteries. There is an outside chance that communications might resume again, but it would be a fleeting opportunity at best.

In all, the mission prooved the existence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface; we saw (with our own eyes) Martian ice melting; it was the first time an atomic force microscope was used outside the bonds of Earth; the discovery that Martian soil may not be that different from the Earth’s and that growing plants in it may not be at all difficult; Phoenix found trace amounts of salt which could be nutrients for life; and finally calcium carbonate which suggests a past existence of liquid water on the surface of an anchient Mars.

And who could forget this image. Not too shabby.

How do I not see these things? This was from back in 2006. I don’t recall ever hearing of this. It is an IMAX on the two Mars rover missions Spirit and Opportunity. Coincidentally, Paul Newman who passed recently apparently had something to do with it as well. I assume narration.

These above images of Mars were composited by Emily Lakdawalla and display a staggering improvement over what we have seen published over and over again since the Viking missions took place in the mid-70’s (see below). You may be familiar with the bottom image as it is one of the few images of Mars taken in a crescent phase. I never would have guessed that by simply re-compiling the data with today’s everyday image software, it was possible to bring out the real beauty hidden within the data.

“That’s my colourized version of the already-classic “Midnight Sun” image created by the Phoenix team, showing the path of the Sun across the sky as seen by the Phoenix lander. Up near the martian north pole Phoenix is in the martian Land of The Midnight Sun, and the Sun never sets, it just dips down towards and then rolls over the southern horizon at midnight before climbing up again…”

Taken from phoenixpics.wordpress.com, a nice Phoenix fan site featuring the best images of the Phoenix mission thus far.