It’s a sad time for the Phoenix team, as the Mars lander approaches its final days on the Red Planet. It’s even sadder to watch Phoenix struggling to regain power after receiving so many unexpected, but satisfactory results from it in the five months of exploration. Three days ago, NASA’s Phoenix lander went into safe mode after suffering a low-power fault due to severe weather conditions.

The weather report from NASA revealed that the conditions at the landing site in the north polar region of Mars have been deteriorating, with temperatures dropping to -141F (-96C) at night, and -50F (-45C) during the day, the lowest encountered by Phoenix since the beginning of its mission. This forced the lander to turn on its battery heaters, which consumed even more of the limited power supply it had at its disposal.

Among blowing winds and lowering temperatures, the lander also received less sunlight, and therefore had little power left to generate. NASA lost contact with Phoenix for an entire day, until the lander finally responded a wake-up call upon Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s passage overhead. Later on, the lander took almost another day to recharge its batteries.

“This is a precarious time for Phoenix,” said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of JPL. The Phoenix team is aware that the rover is already in its second extension-month, and that it might stop all activities in a matter of weeks. The engineers are doing everything in their power to keep Phoenix alive, said Goldstein, but its survivability depends on elements that are beyond their control, namely the weather and the temperatures on Mars.

Phoenix’s mission was supposed to stretch over 90 Martian days, or 92 Earth days in the north region of the planet, at temperatures of minus 73 C to minus 33 C (minus 100 F to minus 28 F). The additional months of exploration forced Phoenix to enter the season shifting period from summer to autumn, which means less and less sunlight to generate power. The inevitable is expected to happen within the next weeks, but it may be just a matter of days until Phoenix reaches the end of its mission.

“It could be a matter of days, or weeks, before the daily power generated by Phoenix is less than needed to operate the spacecraft,” said JPL mission manager Chris Lewicki. “We have only a few options left to reduce energy usage.”

The team in charge of the Mars lander revealed plans to turn off four heaters in order to preserve power, however, not all at once, but one at a time. But as weather conditions worsen, and time becomes more precious, they had to shut down 2 heaters at once, one of which heated the robotic arm, the robotic-arm camera, and the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA).