Mars update

Though we haven't seen a lot of Mars in the news lately, for those who keep track, the past couple of months have been somewhat stressful.  A sandstorm started on Mars over a month ago.  It's still raging on, and even though the rovers are on opposite sides of the planet, the storm has affected both rovers.

This dust storm has measurable effects.  It's made the sky more opaque, added dust to the solar panels, and made the atmosphere retain a little more heat.  With the dust in the sky, less sun light makes it down to the rovers.  With new layers of dust on the panels, even more of the sunlight is blocked out.  And even though the dust helps retain heat,  it's not a huge difference, and it's still cold enough that the emergency heaters could be turned on.

Right now the rovers are running on borrowed time.  We're all surprised the robots have lasted this long (happily surprised!), and that the batteries have managed to retain enough charge to keep the rovers going.

Day by day the batteries are monitored, as is the power usage and power generated by the solar panels.  For any given day, if more power is produced than is consumed, it's called a "power positive day". A "Power Negative Day" would be a day when more power is used than is made.  Power negative days drain the batteries down.

Over the last several weeks, the rovers teams have trimmed power consumption down drastically, and the result is that even on the darkest days, the rovers were able to operate with positive power balances.  The danger remains that the heaters could be triggered, and it wouldn't take long for the heaters to drain the batteries. 

The good news is that today on the Rovers web site I see that the dust is starting to clear.

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Phoenix is on it's way to Mars.  It has successfully completed it's first TCM - trajectory correction maneuver - or flight correction.   So far, everything is going well.