Article
Farewell to Phoenix
Nasa's Martian probe has come to a dark and frigid end, but its dying gasp was 'triumph'
Image: Nasa/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
As the bitter Martian chill sinks into its metal innards, Phoenix has twittered its last. The plucky robotic lander that set off from Earth on August 4 2007 and landed on the red planet on May 25 this year has finally come to the end of its mission – having almost doubled its planned operational life of three months.
But shutdown had to happen eventually. The probe landed further north than any previous Martian lander and as winter sets in and the days shorten it is no longer receiving enough light during the day to charge its batteries. Dustier skies, more cloud cover and gathering cold also contributed to its demise.
It has been a busy five months. In that time, Phoenix has sent back more than 25,000 images. It has verified the presence of water-ice under the surface. It has operated the first atomic force microscope ever used on another world. It has found small quantities of salts that could be substrates for life. And it made the puzzling discovery of perchlorate salts.
Phoenix's final twitter read "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000", the binary code for "triumph". And her controllers added "MarsPhoenix is finally frozen in the Martian arctic plain. Veni, vidi, fodi."
If your Latin is rusty that means "I came, I saw, I dug".
The Latin epitaph was the winner of a competition run by Wired to write the catchiest sign-off less than 140 characters long. My favourite, though – from a certain D. Adams – was "So long and thanks for all the ice".
There is a small chance Phoenix might wake up in spring and phone home. Watch this space.
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User Comments
Rachelthedigger
11 November 2008 11:17AM
'Veni, vidi, fodi'? What were all those people saying about the irrelevance of Latin in the modern world, and where are we going to tell them to stuff it?
hdtvdaly
11 November 2008 2:02PM
What if the Maritians are mugs like people from Laois and they come over to Earth and we have loads more Laois type people floating around?
That would suck.
Imhotepa
11 November 2008 3:56PM
01010011 01101100 01100101 01100101 01110000 00100000 01110111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100001 00100000 00111010 00101101 00101001
fantod
11 November 2008 4:36PM
Requiescat in pace, Phoenix.
Meanwhile, incredibly, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue to soldier stalwartly forward:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
demosstheknees
11 November 2008 5:16PM
Phoenix's final twitter read "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000", the binary code for "triumph"
This is nonsense. Bah! so called science blog.
sooterkin
11 November 2008 6:06PM
What is the creationist take on Mars? Can Palin see it from her house? We need more faith-based science initiatives.
fred2
11 November 2008 6:18PM
the binary code for "triumph"
or '84 114 105 117 109 112 104 ' in decimal, which I suppose could mean a lot of things. Are they sure it wasn't trying to buy a lottery ticket?
Geek fact of the day - it was using the ASCII character set. Beat that suckas.
Imhotepa
11 November 2008 7:29PM
I guess the programmer did only choose this word "triumph" for the final message, meaning: "All systems successfully shut down" or something like that.
One man had written: 'What do you mean "One way mission"?!' :-)
Lex10
11 November 2008 7:37PM
I saw this in my RSS reader and said Come on! another bloody Joaquin-Phoenix-Retiring story?!?!?
danwiththeplan
12 November 2008 12:22AM
If anyone wants to translate Imhotepa's remarks..
http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp
..and sweet dreams..
rmmy
12 November 2008 1:44AM
@danwiththeplan
Hi. The link doesn't work. Is there any other we can try?
rmmy
12 November 2008 1:49AM
I found another binary to text site:
http://snarkles.net/scripts/binary/binary.php
01001000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101110 01101001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101000 01101001 01100010 01100101 01110010 01101110 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101110 00100000 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110011 01110000 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100001
Beelzebozo
12 November 2008 8:50AM
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00100000 01101101 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100001
johnnytodd
12 November 2008 11:37AM
01101001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 00101101 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101111 01110111 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101
Imhotepa
12 November 2008 9:03PM
lolol, johnnytodd
01001110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100011 01110010 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110100 01101111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01100010 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01100100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010 01110011 00101110
reggaestar
13 November 2008 9:08AM
010010010010000001110111011010010111001101101000001000000100100100100000011000110110111101110101011011000110010000100000011000100110010100100000011101000110100001100101011100100110010100100000011101000110111100100000011101000111010101100011011010110010000001111001011011110111010100100000011010010110111000100000011000010110111001100100001000000111001101100001011110010010000001100111011011110110111101100100011011100110100101100111011010000111010000101100001000000101000001101000011001010110111101101110011010010111100000101110001000000011101000101001
reggaestar
13 November 2008 9:12AM
http://www.nickciske.com/tools/binary.php
that should let you do binary, hex and octal! :-)
you can find a whole forum thread written in binary at http://plus613.net/forum/read.php?7,286821
FrogStar
13 November 2008 1:54PM
It might have picked up a good bit more solar energy if its panels were tilted towards the sun a little ... but I suppose one more thing to go wrong after a long journey.
CommunityMod
14 November 2008 12:11PM
@imhotepa
01001110 01101001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01110010 01111001
Imhotepa
14 November 2008 8:18PM
@ CommunityMod
I'm always nice. :-)
Should be possible to learn to read binary. Like Morse code.
chrisward1978
11 November 2008 9:47AM
What a great story if it does reawaken next spring. Gives you an idea of the fragility of nature over the winter months, in a way.