Phoenix Lander Has Built In Zombie Mode: NASA Unleashes Undead Robots Upon the Cosmos

If anyone has been following the unfortunate history of Martian landing vehicles you would know that they fail a lot, a whole lot. It is a failure rate that puts the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death into some serious perspective. So imagine my glee when I discovered that another multi-million dollar coin flip is going down this Sunday when the Phoenix Lander tries an end run for the Martian polar tundra (full details). Im betting it is gonna crash and burn like its auspicious predecessor the Mars Polar Lander, but if it doesn't it will do a whole host of sciency things on the surface. It cannot move, but oh boy! can it dig.
The reincarnated lander is working against the clock, since the Martian winter almost certainly means it will end up frozen into uselessness. But in a stark display of poor planning the people at NASA gave this robot a "Lazarus" mode that will presumably utilize some kind of dark magic to power undead Lander. If this Lander somehow spreads its undeath to the rest of the Mars probes, we could be facing a hostile horde of undead rovers and motionless weather stations.