BBC: From its vantage above the Martian surface, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shed light on the demise of another NASA Mars mission, Phoenix. The Phoenix lander set down south of Mars’s northern polar cap 25 May 2008.
After collecting data about the planet’s water and ice, the lander abruptly shut down communications with Earth 120 Martian days later. MRO’s high-resolution imager can just make out the lander, but recent images are noticeably different from images taken two years ago. Although the images can’t account for Phoenix’s telecommunications failure, they do show what might have happened afterward: the lander was broken apart by Martian ice.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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