NASA on Monday declared an end to the Phoenix mission, some five months after the spacecraft became the first to land in Mars’ arctic plains and taste water on another planet.
Mission engineers have not heard from the Phoenix lander in over a week. It fell silent shortly after a raging dust storm blocked sunlight from reaching its solar panels. Although ground controllers will direct two satellites orbiting Mars to listen for Phoenix for several more weeks, the chances that it will respond are slim.
“We are actually ceasing operations, declaring an end of mission operations at this point,” said project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed the US$475 million mission.
Phoenix’s demise was predicted. Unlike its hardy twin rover cousins Spirit and Opportunity, which are approaching their fifth year near the red planet’s more hospitable equatorial region, Phoenix’s days were numbered from the outset. With sunlight waning and winter encroaching the arctic plains, scientists had said it was a matter of time before Phoenix would freeze to death.
Since its successful landing in May, Phoenix has sent back a bonanza of scientific discoveries. Its first breakthrough was the confirmation of ice at its landing site. Previous measurements from space suggested there was frozen water lurking inches below the surface, but Phoenix became the first robotic probe to touch and taste it by melting icy soil in one of its lab instruments.
Originally pegged to last three months, Phoenix lasted a little over five months, flexing its long arm to dig trenches in the soil and delivering dirt and ice to its onboard instruments to analyze.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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