Phoenix Enters Safe Mode

Using the battery heaters to keep the battery warm is just plain silly at this point, with sunlight dimishing, and the temps getting so cold. It's obvious that the cold id taking it's toll. You beat the odds, and had an extended mission. Save the expensive Operations dollars for something else in this tight budgetary world, and shut the lab down. In a gracefull manner - say 'good-night' instead of experimenting.

re: Charlie

It seems like it would be beneficial to try to keep it working for as long as possible, if only to test the limits of what we can do. This would be good to know for future missions.

Given what it takes to get a labratory to Mars, operations money is a pittance. If you have a working instrument on Mars, you need to work it as long as possible. As the instruments are gracefully shut down by reducing the available heaters, the operations costs drop as well. At MDA, who are doing the operations for 3 of the remaining 4 or 5 instruments, we have a very small team supporting the remaining ops. This is not expensive. Getting telemetry and using the orbiters to relay and all the rest is relatively expensive, but these missions have their own teams as well and Phoenix support is just a part-time gig for them. The data is so precious that each datum tells us useful things and we should draw out every possible minute of observations that we can get.

Paul

I agree; once you've spent all the time, effort, and money it takes to build it, send it to Mars, land it successfully, and get the instruments deployed and running, it only makes sense to run it for as long as you can. This will be our last chance to get weather data from the edge of the North pole as winter approaches for a long long time; let's get as much data as we can.