NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander Dead, Helped Seed the Stars with Science Fiction

NASA has officially declared its Phoenix Mars Lander dead. The spacecraft, which touched down on the Red Planet's artic plane on May 25, 2008, and conducted months of soil experiments, has finally fallen victim to a lack of sunlight needed to charge its batteries. Beyond generating scientific value, the Phoenix Mars Lander helped to seed the stars with science fiction in two important ways.

First, it served as a host for The Planetary Society’s Visions of Mars library. A silica glass DVD that holds the works of about fifty science fiction writers, the Visions of Mars library will remain aboard the dead spacecraft and should survive for at least 500 years on the planet’s frozen surface.

Second, the Phoenix Mars Lander talked about its mission through Twitter and chronicled the end of its life in “My Last Days on Mars,” a series of blog posts at Gizmodo. This is clever science fiction, as the humans at NASA are behind the whole gag.

Congratulations to NASA, the University of Arizona, and everyone else that worked to make the Phoenix Mars Mission a success.