Sadly, Mars Phoenix signs off. Veni, vidi, fodi.

This photograph from June 2008, shows the Robotic Arm on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander carrying a scoop of Martian soil bound for the spacecraft's microscope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Been reading messages on the web and most recently on Twitter, from Mars Phoenix. It signed off with possibly it's last message for a very long time just 30 mins ago:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000

which translates as: Triumph.

The Martian winter could keep it asleep for a year and while there is a faint hope it will come back to life because of it's Lazarus Mode, the little guy is probably finished.

That Twitter was followed up by:

[From Phoenix mission ops: Phoenix is no longer communicating with Earth. We'll continue to listen, but it's likely its mission has ended.]

Official announcement from JPL's Phoenix team here. And more on Phoenix in Wired Science here.

In the anthropomorphizing style the Twitter posts from the bot were written, it's tough not to be a little sad that the machine won't be heard from again.

01001011 01100101 01100101 01110000 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110010 01101101 00100000 01010000 01101000 01101111 01100101 01101110 01101001 01111000 00101110 00100000 01010111 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

Mike

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