PRESENT TENSE:YOU SHOULDN'T be expected to feel sad for a dead robot, but you would need a tin heart not to have felt a twinge for the Phoenix lander, which has finally frozen and died on the surface of Mars, writes Shane Hegarty
It did, though, manage to send a final message to the world. It was the most affecting sequence of binary code you're ever likely to read.
In zeros and ones it had exclaimed "triumph", and added a loveheart emoticon. Shortly afterwards, Nasa announced Phoenix had stopped working and gave it the epitaph "Veni, vidi, fodi". For those whose Latin is as rough as their binary, that means "I came, I saw, I dug".
Actually, the robot's final message hadn't been posted from Mars but from a PR office inside a building in California. That people across the globe had become emotionally invested enough to want to believe otherwise illustrates just how successful the robot's pithy but popular diary had become.
Just before it landed on Mars, Nasa had the bright idea of setting up a Twitter account for Phoenix. Twitter is a website that allows messages of 140 characters or less to be posted online and directly to phones and social networking pages, making it a sort of global text message service.
From fairly banal beginnings (first post: "Less than 20 days till I land on Mars") Phoenix's entries had mixed scientific insight with an almost teenage giddiness ("Navigation is looking good. Yay!!"). But in its final weeks, the excitement and sense of adventure gave way to a strange pathos as Phoenix began to "tweet" about its impending death. For the past few weeks, it has been in "Lazarus" mode, shutting down before waking every morning with no idea of where it is until it felt the surface of Mars beneath it. Through Twitter it detailed its gradual demise: its heaters being turned off; an arm freezing; its growing technological drowsiness.
"I'm not mobile, so here I'll stay. My mission will draw to an end soon, and I can't imagine a greater place to be than here," read one post.
"Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I'll be keeping an eye from here," read another.
It talked about the possibility of waking up once the three dark months of Martian winter pass but faced inevitable doom with a stoic sense of self-sacrifice. "I should stay well-preserved in this cold. I'll be humankind's monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me."
Phoenix's certain death had its narrative advantages, because it gave it a neat ending and an opportunity to be philosophical. Even when it began to break out and write "guest blogs" on other sites, it had a winning sincerity. "One of the most common questions I'm asked and one of the most difficult to explain, is whether I knew going in that this mission would cost me my life. The answer to that is yes, of course, and there's not a single robotic explorer in our solar system that doesn't know it faces the same fate. Unlike all of you, most of us can't go home again."
Obviously, all of this was being written not from the frozen desert of an alien planet, but from a desk in Pasadena by a ghostwriter, Veronica McGregor. But Nasa couldn't have done a finer job at anthropomorphising Phoenix if it had given the robot big blue eyes and a bonnet.
The result could have been frivolous and overly saccharine, a kind of 'Mars 90210', but has instead reminded us of just how awesome space travel is and how thankful we should be to our robotic pioneers. Scattered across the solar system are probes of various vintage, some zipping into deep space well beyond the planets. The twittering from Phoenix may have ended but several other missions are still posting, such as the Cassini probe around Saturn, which recently posted about a "great day. Flew through the ring plane did distant flyby of moons."
THE PROBLEM FOR NASA IS THE PUBLIC has become so used to the idea of space exploration it switches off quicker than a robot on a frozen planet. It was the case with the Apollo moon missions, when the public lost attention almost immediately, perking up only when the crew of Apollo 13 almost got lost in space. And the only space shuttles most people can now recall are the two that exploded.
The problem for science is that in a technologically advanced age the public takes its wonders for granted. Science Week Ireland comes to an end this weekend, having gone all out to promote the benefits, opportunities and basic fun of science. The surprising manner in which a Martian robot became the new Bridget Jones must offer lessons for scientists hoping to emphasise the humanity in their work, and give hope to those trying to encourage the next generation to join them.
shegarty@irish-times.ie