Mars' explorer ship is dead

The explorer Mars Phoenix (Phoenix) was no longer active after being hit by a carbon bandage that damaged the solar panels, announced by the JPL Laboratory of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA).

The agency also said it had decided to give up all efforts to contact the ship since May 24.

The Phoenix ship is no longer active, but its findings are valuable to scientists

The Phoenix landed near the north pole of Mars on May 25, 2008, and operated quite successfully during 5 months - 2 months longer than originally planned. By early November 2008, NASA scientists no longer received signals from the ship.

Although they did not expect the "surviving" ship to survive in the winter in Mars (when the sun no longer reached where Phoenix landed), they continued to search for signals from it.

This year, they sent the Mars Odyssey flying over the Phoenix landing site more than 200 times in hopes of gathering something from the ship but did not receive a reply. Last week, when the northern hemisphere was north of the summer, NASA tried again but failed.

Earlier, in early May, another probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captured images of Phoenix's shadow changes, and these images were in line with the prediction that the ship had hundreds of kilograms. ice covering, damaging the solar panels of the ship.

It was these things that made NASA decide to announce the 'death' of the ship after two years of hope.

Phoenix is ​​sent to Mars to perform space exploration missions under the Mars Exploration program. This is the first mission to Mars controlled by key scientists and researchers; is also the first NASA probe to use the Twitter site to communicate with the public.

Since the successful landing near the northernmost point of Mars in May 2008, the Phoenix has detected the first evidence of water and witnessed the snowfall on the red planet.

In addition, Phoenix recorded more than 25,000 images from the surface to the atomic layer on Mars, found small salt concentration areas capable of creating a source of nutrition for life .

Source: AP, Xinhua