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May 29, 2008
The key communication link with NASA’s Phoenix lander has been restored, after an outage delayed the mission’s progress by one day.
Phoenix does not communicate directly with Earth, but are relayed between Phoenix and Earth by two NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars.
The problem occurred when NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) UHF radio failed to relay a sequence of commands from Earth, intended to guide Phoenix through the second day of its mission.
Because Phoenix did not receive any fresh instructions, it performed what is known as a “run-out sequence”, which amounts to a continuation of the previous day’s activities.
On Tuesday evening, MRO’s UHF radio started working again and successfully relayed images and other data from Phoenix back to Earth. MRO’s radio apparently went into a standby mode, for a still unknown reason.
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