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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.""
No, it's more the case that the cost, primarily in weight, of adding the required fan, wiper, or other cleaning system outweighs the value added with more scientific instruments. And given that the panels are relatively fragile (remember, every gram of mass has a dollar amount attatched to it) you'd need to be awfully careful -- wipers are out.
Also, it's something else that can fail. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, but if you ruin the solar panels halfway into the base mission because it doesn't work, people start looking really dumb. Or if the shape of grains of martian soil is not quite the same as earth soil and it ends up not working. Or there's something else that might fail, you leave a backup for it out, and then look really stupid when that part fails and you've still got plenty of solar energy.
The biggest problem, of course, is that the designers of the probe are hamstrung by rather unreasonable launch costs that are showing little signs of getting better and are prevented by vast armies of rather stupid anti-nuclear-power whackos from using a 5 year power source. Oh yeah, and most of the NASA budget is reserved for a space shuttle that is far too expensive and has not been able to be retired and replaced due to a variety of issues.
But, in general, it's much better to get a different assortment of tools on a different probe in a completely different location every 2 years, with a chance to have design improvements, instead of having two massive probes that last for 5 years and can only be launched every 10 years.
Gentoo Sucks
Perhaps it's because an exploding bottle of nitrogen would probably total the probe. Always consider what failure of the doo-dad would do to the overall mission before including the doo-dad. Dirty solar panels are one thing, shredded panels is another.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Static charge?
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
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.