With winter approaching Mars’ northern hemisphere, and soon to blanket the planet’s Arctic region in months of darkness, the Martian Phoenix Lander will probably meet with a freezing demise, says Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is of course possible, though unlikely, that the probe will manage to reboot itself come springtime though:

Phoenix does have a built in reboot program that its designers call a ‘Lazarus mode,’ “where when energy comes back into the vehicle from the solar arrays - if and when energy comes - it’ll automatically try to reboot and try to communicate,” Goldstein explained. But he doubts that will happen. “I would be overjoyed to hear something come back from Phoenix; I’m extremely … I find it very, very unlikely,” Goldstein said. The reason Goldstein, and others on the Phoenix team, think it unlikely that Phoenix will make a comeback is simple: The lander has entered conditions on the surface beyond what it was built and tested to withstand.