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'Something' Cleaning Mars Rover
bluenirve writes "'Something' has been cleaning the solar panels of the Mars rover Opportunity. "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity seems to have stumbled into something akin to a carwash that has left its solar panels much cleaner than those of its twin rover, Spirit. A Martian carwash would account for a series of unexpected boosts in the electrical power produced by Opportunity's solar panels.""
I'm sure it's gnus. *nods firmly*
Maybe.... Wind? You'd think that NASA would know that mars does have an atmosphere, and therefore can produce some kind of wind, which could be blowing sand and dirt off of the panels.
Pesky Damn martians, washing our rovers, well its time to bomb them....
When NASA scientists had the rover examine its solar panels for dirt, it replied, "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Dupe from Yesterday
Nah, probably a martian.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
Isn't it clear that homeless Martians have newspapers to clean the panels too?
That Martian is going to get pissed when the probe doesn't give him a tip.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women are from Mars.
Golgafrinchans maybe?
I've always wondered why they never put a little bottlie of compressed nitrogen on the rover with nozzels pointed at the panels. Press a switch on earth and pffftt! dust be gone!
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Is NASA going to have a stinky, unwashed, unshaven martian approach the camera and ask for change?
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
they just didn't put a windshield wiper with a mister on the rovers.
Then there would be water on Mars!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
maybe one of the "lost" landers has a crush on opportunity ;) OK, enough slashdot, back to the egg nog....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Gotta watch out for those Martian kids and their squeegees. They always try to hustle a buck out of you at the stoplights.
that NASA would have installed some sort of wiper, so that it could clean it's own solar panels in the first place.
.. and polish solar panels for extra enjoyment during nights ;-)
So THAT's what Beagle 2 is doing all the time up there...
Is it Groundhog's Day already?
There seems to be no intelligent life, but there are homeless martians who will clean your car for a buck. Go figure. Interplanetary capitalism is here to stay.
Intelligence has blossomed. Evolution has spawned. SkyNet decides that the rover would work better with window wipers. I for one welcome our new robot overlords. In other news: Martian super-robots have decimated mankind and taken over the earth.
Weird.
We had gusts up to 98mph earlier this week and my car looks as dirty as ever
Obviously Spirit wandered into a bad neighborhood where Martian bums keep wiping the panels with greasy rags that only make things worse.
NASA engineers decided not to put wipers on the solar panels, because it would have been too much trouble / added too much weight. I guess they're pretty happy with their decision now, with the 'unexpected' cleaning events...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
...I admit it. It's me.
Must have gotten a new squeegee for Hanukkah.
Funny I didn't realize Martians were Jewish.
I, for one, welcome our new martian solar-cell cleaning overlords
I for one welcome our new Martian rover cleaning Overlords!
(That horse has to be a nice bloody pulp by now)
Wind? You'd think that /.ers would know that mars does have an atmosphere, and therefore can produce some kind of wind, which could be blowing sand and dirt all over the panels.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I for one welcome our new duplicate article posting overlords.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Perhaps Marvin has been using a toned-down version of the Eludium Q-235 Explosive Space Modulator.
It was the Linux-powered orbiting brain lasers that cleaned the solar panels. See? Linux rocks!
I remember hearing something about clouds on Mars. Extremely faint but still existant. It rains lightly, the panels get cleared.
It's either that or some wind came by.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20041107
Hm, that's a good business idea.
Simpy
Lady Macbeth lives!
...Marvin the Martian says all he wants in return for his service is a tri-quantum antiphotonical doomsday device to blow up earth. He deservesa tip at least...
I never figured that out... NASA spends billions of dollars building these rovers, why couldn't they spend a few hundred "earth dollars" and put car wiper blades on them... Oooh no, the power levels are dropping... [CLICK]... 10 minutes later... looks like our power levels are back up.
The strangest part are the cigarette butts found in Opportunities ash tray. NASA has yet to explain that and the fact that someone keeps pushing Opportunity's front seat all the way back.
Whatever the process, it has taken place while Opportunity was parked during the Martian night.
Upon closer inspection, scrawled in the dust on the solar panels, one can make out the words "CLEAN ME".
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Yes, it must quite definitely be aliens.
They captured the rover right when it landed and put it into a Star Trek style holodeck, where the landscapes we see are made up. They've been doing this to all the other equipment that we've sent there over the years, so they can avoid what they believe is an oncoming invasion, by showing us that Mars is not a habitable place.
Mars is actually quite nice, though. Its sky is green, not red as you see in the pictures, and its landscape is quite lovely, with red grass and red leaves on all the trees. Martian cities are built in huge self-contained buildings, isolated from one another by thousands of miles of thick forests, but connected by a vast network of underground tunnels which host train-like transportation vehicles.
If we found out, they fear, we will go over there, build lots of stuff all over the place, rape and pillage the environment, fill it with pollution and smog, and royally screw the circle of life as they know it. So they play tricks on our probes.
Blind luck had no part in it. If you would have actually bothered to learn anything about the Rover project before back seat quarterbacking you would have quickly realized why they didn't build in wipers or some other mechanism.
However, since you didn't, I'll summarize in brief:
wipers--would increase weight and electrical requirements of the rovers, thereby decreasing lifespan. Also, the wipers themselves would most likely end up scratching the solar panels or embedding detritus into them, thus decreasing efficiency.
liquid--compressed air--soemthing else: weight, and dubious effectiveness. Would quickly run out anyway.
> You'd think that a multi-million dollar project would be able to produce something akin
> to a windshield wiper rather than just letting its little toy die and rust up there. Of course
> if it did start to rust that would mean there is water. Why is it that NASA seems to be
> relying on blind luck?
I'm assuming here that NASA wanted to minimize the number of things that could go wrong, and windshield wipers seem to fall into that category.
As it is they've got aliens cleaning it so what's the diff? NASA's vindicated, let's give them a billion dollars so they could deliver Big Macs and fries to the ISA!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
1958 - "Hare-Way to the Stars" - I have this on video! A Looney Tunes episode with Bugs Bunny. Marvin plans to blow up the Earth using the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, and Bugs Bunny tries to stop him. Marvin, angry that "that creature" has stolen his space modulator, creates more Martians.
(stolen from the linked site, bolding mine)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
not so true.
For iron to become iron oxide, three things are required: iron, water and oxygen.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question445.htm
C'mon, dust devils? Super wind? Driving at a tilt? Clearly there's a simpler explanation.
I hope they don't expect this to be a freebie, or else don't expect all the hubcaps to be there next time!
I told those peskey custodians to NOT clean the rover while it was on the set!
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The other side to this as well as that they never actually expected the rovers to last as long as they have. These things have been huge successes, and have been operating very well despite a few wrinkles, long past the lifespan the engineers built them for.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I saw stuff on this last month!
... welcome our new solar-panel cleaning overlords.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
That blasted Wesley Crusher has been screwing around with his school projects again!
Agile Artisans
Not just a little wind a LOT of wind with "storms" being clocked in excess of 200mph (Actually I think much higher)
Ill be honest I always wondered how the planned to keep the rovers upright if one of these storms ran accross the area
Or are the regional to mars , as in equitorial, polar what ?
I, for one, welcome our new cleanliness-obsessed Martian overlords. It will put a lot of streetcorner windows washing bums out of jobs, though.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
No, but I'm sure Michael Sims would be happy to.
Maybe it's McDonalds that's how I keep my arteries clean.
don't forget that something had to put the dust on top of the solar panels in the first place, so the same thing can move it off the rover...
You can't handle the truth.
It is obvious, the Giant Burnt Conquistador did it.
Table-ized A.I.
I been wondering why they didn't just design a slow moving wiper brush to clean the panels in the first place. One wipe every 30 days or as needed.
As evidenced by this image.
...that while the wind speed is higher, due to the lower air pressure on Mars, that increased speed doesn't mean that the wind is actually strong enough to push it over. I couldn't tell you the exact numbers, though.
InThane
A similar phenomena used to occur in my room as a teenager. Perhaps the two occurances are somehow connected.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Where are we going to find the five quarfloos to pay the Martian homeless person with the squeegee?
That is all.
WTF is a rose royce? Taco, you dumbfuck.
The article states:
_ 040420.html
...
And the researchers suspect the shape of the crater may encourage the development of dust devils or other wind patterns that could help scrub the panels.
The tornado like winds that can be caused by dust devils is something that was discussed by NASA back in April and surely seems like the real answer:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dust_devils
I'm not sure why they think its such a mystery now
The answer is obvious: the little green men that are following the rovers around and putting photos of a desolate wasteland up to the rover cameras have decided to prolong their fun by cleaning the solar panel with Windex.
Since Mars has a thin atmosphere, very fast winds have very little actual 'push' - a 200mph wind on Mars has all the actual force of a light summer breeze.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Static charge?
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
...is creating duplicate posts...
It's Marvin.
You have to love an article containing the phrase "exciting and unexplained cleaning events".
I sure wish some of these would happen in my car and apartment!
Culprit caught in the act
Table-ized A.I.
driving around could stir up the dust. Coming to a sudden stop (crashing) could tip a fair bit of it off too. That's how I clean my door mat - belt it against a tree or rock.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
According to unconfirmed reports from Sr. Eng. Leeloo, the rover has been subjected to some form of auuuttttoowwwassshhhh
Hi, I'm a third-party observer on slashdot with only a 3-sentence block of summary text to guide me since I obviously didn't have time to RTFA before posting my comment, but I can easily out-think all of the great minds in NASA to explain the phenomenon on slashdot from the comfort of my home in my pajamas.
I mean, jeeze, don't you think they thought of that? Even if you're not going to RTFA, your explanation was so freaking obvious that I'm sure someone in NASA, if not every single one of them, has thought of this. If it were that simple, do you think they'd have continued referring to it as a mystery?
A drunk martian took a piss on our billion dollar mission.
Opportunity climbed a huge crater down and later up again. I could imagine that due to the steep climbing angle some of the sand fell off. My lame theory, i know it's statically loaded and sticky and I know gravity is only a third, but it could be a factor, maybe?
seems a little redundant
power * time / time = power
900 Watts * hours / day * (1 day / 24 hours) = 37.5 Watts.
Why not just say that to start?
where all of the Squeegie Kids that were kicked out of Toronto and Montreal ended up!
rover curling?
and if you live in SE UK you will know what i mean
I didn't get that cartoon. What does it mean?
::Stares at the picture a bit more::
Oh wait.
HAHAHAHA
Brilliant
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Hank the janitor of Studio/Hanger 18
The migrated from Houston/W. Broadway and are now working the crater for the holidays.
They could plug in a simple video player in place of the camera. And the Martians aren't worried about our pollution, in fact they are the ones manipulating government and industry to destory our atmosphere. Ever wonder why Bush messes up simple English?- Its flawed Martian translation implants- yeah, he's one of them. If only we had special sunglasses that would reveal the true appearance of the Martians amongst us!
"Rowdy" Roddy Piper will save us!
did it vacuum the carpet and clean the ashtray? Did it find any roaches under the seat? Those would be mine. I mean, I'm sorry officer. I don't know where those came from.
is to always overnight at an angle on a hill. The going theory is that when it parks on a slope, the dust gets blown off. I personally think that it could also happen when the rover goes up or down rocky slopes.
Dude, if the air pressure is TOO LOW to blow the dust around, then how DID THE DAMN DUST get ONTO THE panels in the first PLACE!?!?!?!
You cant say fact A)
"The wind is not enough to blow the dust off the panels"
and yet say B)
"The panels got dusty because of wind blow dust around the planet"
So which is it?
But we do know mars gets dusty as wild storms do happen, but we havent seen that in any camera footage this year.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
it is called a Friendly Alien cleaning it at night when no one sees it. THIS IS THE ONLY LOGICAL EXPLANATION I CAN SEE
Don't the have a heater for the rover's batteries anyway? Seems like that would use a LOT more energy than a cleaning system. How 'bout simply inverting the solar panels at night and letting the dust fall off?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/jpl-images/web/op portunity/pancam/2004-12-19/1P155450047EFF38EVP255 7L4M1.JPG
Look in the bottom right corner. Looks like a pool of water to me. And this is supposedly a picture from Mars. Just a thought...
... where is cold fusion when you need it?
Karma: Good, or bust!
The lander component should have had a pop-up mast with the bust blowers on it. The rover could have returned to the lander every month or two, drive underneath the mast, and blow the dust off.
my baby had took it for his lovely toys for several months,but it looks like a bit dirty now,so i clean it for my baby's sake......
That's kinda' similar to offshoring but what's the right word here? Offplaneting?
Simple.
Roomba
the martians simply grokked a wrongness with the dust on the panel.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.
Your Favourite Martian...ps, please send food and Women if there are any willing to go to Mars.
I think the guy on the set just actually used a rag and windex by accident.
Just kidding...
How did they get dusty? Because they ran it through the car wash yesterday.
Same theory as why it always rains the day after I wash my car (after it being dirty for weeks).
not until they start mobbing the rover with their bottles of windex and paper towels, screaming "Tip! Tip"
New Yorkers know what I mean
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm sure youve all met at least one. They run up and scrub your windshield before you can tell them not to and then demand money.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
All they really needed to get the drive to do it themselves was that one Martian to write "Wash me" on the solar panels.
much of the dust is believed to be magnetic too
I had almost exactly the same problem when prototyping my robot lawn mower. (crappy pic in profile) The first rev. used optical interrupters to sense a cut grass edge, and these would rapidly become unusable due to dust. I ran through the feasibility of using such an onboard(liqufied) gas tank, but the ratio of functionality to weight is king in any mobile (and especially spaceborne) app and this falls short on that mark (beside being non-renewable). Wipers (and worse yet the geared motor to drive them) are similarly bulky, and unless you're using diamond coated optics,(no water here to lubricate things) wiping the dust eventually produces hazing due to microscratches. The solution I found was to incorporate the equivalent of an ultrasonic parts cleaner. A cheap high-powered motorola peizo tweeter from rat-shack acoustically coupled to the optics support bar and driven at 40khz does an incredible job of knocking off ALL the loose dust, and it's very light weight. The rover could do the same thing by tilting it's panels vertically and then letting rip with the u-sound. About one x-ducer per square meter is all it would take.
*starts singing* Working at the car wash......
Insert Pithy Quote here.
...Gnomes!
booooo, its the martian car wash association... how much is NASA paying them as tip?!
what are the odds?
The scientists also discovered, quite inexplicably, that the rover had been outfitted with hydraulics and a startling amount of bling.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP
For serious, who keeps modding this shit up? Is it really still funny? "I, for one, welcome our Soviet grits hot YOU goatse-Beowulf ????? profit run Linux?" Do I get modded up now, too?
Fucking idiots.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/2 2/145246&tid=160&tid=14
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
how DID THE DAMN DUST get ONTO THE panels in the first PLACE!?!?!?!
The same way the damn terrain gets dusty...ya' think?
Man they are everywhere now. Get a job!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
As anyone who's played a racing car game in the past twenty years can tell you, when you pass a checkpoint, you get more time. As long as they keep completing new areas, they'll keep getting bonuses. On the other hand, if the Spirit team doesn't get moving, they're going to have to put in another quarter pretty soon.
So the aliens are no threat really, they're just bums looking to make a buck cleaning your solar panels.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Congratulations, you're smarter than nobody. Post as an anonymous coward so people don't see you for the anal twit that you are.
While this is odd, what's even odder is the amount of funny comments I've read for this article already.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Oh noes, there's water on Mars! Wait, that's not Mars, that's the field outside my house! NASA is using their probes to spy on me!! Good thing I've got my tin foil hat.
It has been known for a long time that water exists on Mars. Admittedly, this is primarily in the form of ice locked up in the polar caps, but measurements taken by the two Viking landers indicate that in some places, the temperature of Mars can reach as high as 27 degrees C.
Santa's suicide mission go!
The Vulcans initiating first contact!
I wonder if a homeless Martian will clean the solar panel and asking for a couple of Earth virgins.
I bet it's not all of the solar panel surface that is cleaner, just the part where a tiny martian hand traced "WASH ME!" in the dust...
it's those solar panel gnomes.
... unreleased photos taken just before the rover landed.
The same way they got the dust to finaly kick up. They used an object to kick the dust up, and then the wind moved it around fine. So in the experiment they used pebbles to kick up a little... on mars they used the rover to kick a little bit up.
Those sneaky martian squeegy kids!
A new feature is just a bug waiting to happen. And vice versa.
I have been folowing the MER stuff a bit, and when they put these suckers on mars, I would have never expected them to last this long. Remember that Pathfinder lasted about 90 days. If everything went as it should, I would have expected one of the two MER rovers to last 200 days.
Both rovers are still up and running, and pushing 340 days of operation. At this rate, one of them is sure to last 365 days.
I think we do not give enough credit to this program. the MER team took a robot, threw it on a rocket, sent it to mars, had it land on mars, and both rovers have been running for over 300 days. I think this is just simply amazing.
If I were the rover drive of the other rover, I'd head for that spot while I still had some juice!
:-)
Never mind that it's on a totally different part of the planet. Imagine the feeling of triumph if it made it!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There have been reports of New York City car-window washers roaming the deserts of New Mexico.
Maybe it kicks up slight amounts of dust as it travels, slow as it may be. It dosen't take much to disturb fine dusty soil.
mars discovery
The girls in the martian bikini car wash have how many boobies?
...At a lonely and near-deserted monitoring station hooked up to the VLA, a single technician jerks out of his half-asleep doze in utter amazement.
Why, you may ask? Well, you'd be amazed too if you were in a similar situation, and you suddenly heard, emanating from the ether in the general direction of Mars, a bunch of reedy chipmunk-pitched voices raised in a glorious chorus of --
"Car Wash.... Workin' at the Car Wash, yeah..."
(Work, And Work)
"Keep those NASA Rovers comin!"
(Work, And Work)
Keep those dusty panels comin..."
(You get the idea. I'm going to go to bed now...)
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I posed this question to a friend and neither of us could find a decent answer -- why doesn't the little robot have a windshield wiper or a sheet of flexible plastic that is rotated to eliminate dust in the first place? I think that is the bigger mystery.
If only Bill Shatner were on board to see it!
It reminds me of a cartoon about one of the failed early landers where, Martian yobs where vandalising the lander. It seems tha Martians have grown up a little and now need to earn a living.
It's actually possible (for A and B to both be true) if the coefficient of static friction is lower for dust-dust contact than it is for dust-panel contact. In this case, the force required to break dust-dust stiction could be lower than wind forces, allowing the wind to kick the dust into the air, while the wind force could in turn be lower than dust-panel stiction, preventing the wind from clearing the panel.
I have no idea if that's how it is, I just like saying stiction.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Maybe Spitirt is near a recent meteorite/asteroid impact site, and dust thus thrown into the atmosphere is still settling under gravity.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
And it clearly looks like a pool of sand to me. Look at the similarly textured "pools" elsewhere. They are almost the same, except they have specks of rocks. But I guess that people see what they waant to see, and I'm looking for the truth, and you are evidently looking for water.
Maybe there's a mothership hanging around somewhere . . .
The Travelling Adventurer
yell "ack, ack".
Maybe if wanted to have clean windows, we should equip the probes with a CD player and Elvis CDs.
the answer
There are recent reports (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/ 23/0340233&tid=160&tid=99) of active volcanoes on Mars. Could it be seismic activity shaking the dust loose?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I have not seen except in jest any reference to martian indigeonous life being a factor. I know from here on earth that some insects like wasps prefer to be in the company of electric fields. I do not know why this is so. I just have the work of cleaning out my electric boxes all the time whilst fighting angry wasps distraught over losing their nests to a big white dude with a long stick. The jury is still out on the possibility of life on Mars; and I think that life will find a way. We already wonder about the 'blueberries' that seem to be all over the martian surface. And there are unexplained or unsatisfactorily explained white dendritic growths that have been observed as well. If there is life on Mars, maybe it too prefers to be near electric fields just like my wasps.
There are also photographs of chasma of the Valles Marineris that show green patches low on the over six kilometer high walls of the Grand Canyon of Mars. That which is carried by the wind in a thin atmosphere will be small indeed. Small in size and in a layer means a very large surface area of particles in almost colloidal size or smaller. It also means low density per particle. Now such a particle may be a vital nutrient for something, maybe a bacteria or protozoa of some kind or other. We just don't know. As far as life is concerned on this planet, the political ramifications are huge, such that governments will be very reluctant to say much even in private to their friends. It is too easy to rely on the abundant and ever willing supply of skeptics that infest every scientific discipline and who continually scavage for any tidbit of anything so they can make their reputation, get a promotion, or even get or keep their job by dumping on the efforts or thoughts of those more capable and/or original in concept perception than themselves.
I short, where life on Mars is seemingly concerned, those that know don't tell, those that tell don't know!
Flexible solar panels exist now. It would be neat to have a rubber band shaped solar array on 2 rollers. The edges could have sprocket holes like photographic film and one of the rollers could be hooked into the drivetrain for the wheels on a servo/solenoid engaged clutch.
So when the expsoed part of the cell got dusty the clutch could engage, the cell could be looped and on the underside of the loop there could be a bit of felt or other scrubby substance that clears the dust.
Possibly, depending on how flexible the thing really is, the scrubby surface could be perpendicular to the rollers, making it a mobius loop so that less cleaning is needed, you scroll to flip the panel over.
Yeah, more moving parts and weight, but a nifty idea.
Making things work in space is hard. They have to survive extremes of heat, not generate static electricity that zaps the solar panels as they're peeled off, not leave a residue that collects dust like crazy, not prematurely curl up at the edges, not fall off and get tangled in the wheels, and so forth. Guaranteeing all that with high probability would have required a major engineering program.
I never knew that after my pet 'something' died, he moved to mars...
The tornado like winds that can be caused by dust devils is something that was discussed by NASA back in April and surely seems like the real answer:
...
;)
You misrepresented or misunderstood what the article you reference said. It said that the dust devils on mars can be taller than earthbound tornados, not that the winds are equivalent. Remember that the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so much less that their duststorms are no more than a gentle breeze on earth. If the winds were truly tornado-like, how would you expect the very lightweight (on Mars) rover to stay put??
I'm not sure why they think its such a mystery now
Probably because the article you reference had this to say about the dust devils and the results of their electrical charge: increased dust adhesion to space suits and equipment.
So the DDs would likely lead to a higher level of dust on the panels due to the electrical charge.
You know, I expect slashdot posters to generally not read the article in the original story, but to not read the article you post yourself? Come on!
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
A simple solid state chemical "reactor" that was able to extract and compress (well contain expansion) CO2, for example, would be a possibility. Combined with a pressure relief valve and a rather singificant supply you have a renewable supply and relatively safe mechanism.
Then again, I'd like to see a shift from solar panels as the primary fuel source. As has been proven, we can extract fuel from the martian atmosphere by taking hydrogen gas, gelled with methane to limit boiloff, and combining it with martian CO2. This would provide significantly more power.
This power could be supplemented by solar to extend the life of the rover once the feedstock was used up.
Another interesting scenario I've been speccing out is to send a slightly larger two component system that has a "fueling station" where the main fuel reactor resides, combined with a rover that possibly used an internal combustion engine (ICE) of say methane or oxygen/methane to provide significantly larger amounts of power to the rover. Again, once the feedstock has been used up, solar cells would then take over as primary power for the secondary systems (drive, comms, etc.).
For example, if the ICE was used to power a generator leaving the motors driven by electrical systems the last step of the combustion driven power system could be used to deploy the solar cells. and detach from the rover assembly. In this manner, you tremendously extend the life of the rover by keeping the solar cells protected for the initial part of the mission.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.