The Phoenix Mars Lander will freeze to death...

News from NASA today that the relentless onset of the Martian winter will doom the Phoenix Mars Lander to a frozen death. It's been there for four months on a mission that was expected to last only three months, but because it depends on solar power, when the sun falls below the Martian horizon, the little feller will cease functioning.

In terms of temperatures per se, current daytime conditions are not that much worse than winter in Minnesota:

Midday temperatures at Phoenix's landing site hit about -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) in the summer (as measured by the lander's meteorological mast thermometer). Nighttime temperatures then still dropped to -112 F (-80 C). Currently, those daytime temperatures have started dipping down to -22 F (-30 C), with nighttime temperatures hitting about -130 F (-90 C).

But by mid-November those nighttime temps will fall to -184 F. Interestingly, with the presence of water on Mars so well established now, the most striking winter phenomenon will be that the lander will become encased in frost or ice:

Right now the frost that is forming is all water ice because it is not yet cold enough at Phoenix's latitude for carbon dioxide ice to form, though it eventually will. Whether the frost will come as a thin coating or a thick sheet, like Mars' polar ice caps, isn't known.

So why can't the lander come back to life in the spring/summer when the sunlight reappears and temperatures improve. It's because of "glassification" (new word):

Most electronics can only last down to about -148 or -193 F (-100 or -125 C), after which some of the materials that make them up go below their glassification temperature."Think about a rubbery substance or a plastic substance becoming brittle like glass, and once that happens, it starts to crack.."

Kind of sad. Like hearing of the death of Wall-E.