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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.""
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
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.
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?
.. and polish solar panels for extra enjoyment during nights ;-)
So THAT's what Beagle 2 is doing all the time up there...
The only way they were able to replicate the observed dust devil effects was to toss larger pebbles into the chamber, kicking the dust up into the wind.
Anyway, the point is that wind is still the most probable cause, but it's not quite the obvious slam-dunk that it superficially seems.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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.
We had gusts up to 98mph earlier this week and my car looks as dirty as ever
Maybe, but Spirit's panels don't get clean. My guess: some martian has a crush on it.
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 for one welcome our new Martian rover cleaning Overlords!
(That horse has to be a nice bloody pulp by now)
You would think they would have built a wiper to sweap the dust off, or maybe some high pressure air hose or fan. Or thy could have added an ability to vibrate the dust off. We all know 'they could have' but they would have also needed approval for this, but they would not get approved because that would mean the project would run on for much longer, meaning more budget money, and no one wants a rover that last for 5 years on the surface. Its all politics, if the engineers had 100% say, they would have designed the bot to work on mars for 20-30years, even with dead batteries, just make it work in the day and smart software to know where its up to if it looses power.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Maybe.... You didn't read the article did you?
"At the time, the team speculated that wind may have swept the dust off the panels or frost may have caused it to clump, exposing more of the panels.
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 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...
Jeez, RTFA :-p That's exactly what they suggest.
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.
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.
... 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
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
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
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.
Sheesh.
The engineers decided not to build something to shake off the solar panels, because that would make the darn thing heavier -- which woule mean they would have had to leave something else off.
Politics had nothing to do with it.
It is obvious, the Giant Burnt Conquistador did it.
Table-ized A.I.
As evidenced by this image.
Yes, that's a possible explanation, although the martian atmosphere is so much thinner than earth, so even with pretty strong wind speeds, it will do significantly less than on Earth.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Maybe.... You didn't read the article did you?
You're new here, aren't you?
...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
NASA can ill afford to jump into such obvious conclusions, it has $16B to blow.
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.
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.
I think it's some one from the airforce coming out of our secret base on mars to clean off the rover at night!
wait, there's an article?
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?
While wind is the most plausible explanation, it is not the most amusing.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
You would think they would have built a wiper to sweap the dust off, or maybe some high pressure air hose or fan. Or thy could have added an ability to vibrate the dust off.
... same problem.
I got to ask a NASA engineer about this once in person.
He said they considered it. But then you have to remember that each of these things has moving parts, which are prone to getting dust in them and clogging, or breaking, or whatever. If you wanted, you could also have multiple layers of solar panels and when one got too dusty, it could "molt" and then the fresh panel would be exposed. They've thought of each of these things.
The problem is that they all add complexity and weight. When you're trying to hurtle something at a planet and have it touch down for landing, making the damn thing bulkier doesn't exactly add to reliability.
If your robot vibrates, then that could loosen screws and the whole thing could rattle itself into a pile of scrap metal.
If your robot blows itself off with an air hose, then you need to have a filter system so you know you're not blowing dusty air on it. But filters get clogged, so eventually the hose system would stop working, and the panels would get dusty.
If your robot molts panels, you then need to add extra motors to lift off a given layer. But these are heavy, and could break. Heavier = more power draw to move around. So if the motors malfunctioned, it wouldn't have gone as far as it would've if it only had a single layer of panels -- meaning you'd get less exploring done.
Wiper motors
Nothing political about it.
Static charge?
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
NASA forgot to tell the martian atmosphere that it cannot move dust.
...is creating duplicate posts...
It's Marvin.
Doesn't frost imply water? (or some other type of liquid that gets frozen?)
Also they forgot that terran gravity is just a wee bit stronger than martian gravity.
"goatse? What's that? Anyone have a link?" - AC
Culprit caught in the act
Table-ized A.I.
There's no question that there's water ice on Mars, folks have mostly been making noises about liquid water.
But CO2 makes good frost, too.
Gentoo Sucks
What about several layers of thin clear plastic that's tensioned?
You have each layer held down with tabs,and release them one by one as the cells accumulate dust. The released plastic curls up at one end of the cells when released.
You could probably do this at least several times.
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.
I was merely pointing out that it's not unreasonable to be surprised at it happening, since tests replicating as closely as possible the conditions believed to obtain on the Martian surface indicate that it's less likely than it seems.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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?
I'm not an engineer there. I'm a college student. The point I was trying to make was that they thought of several mechanisms by which the surfaces could be restored, and they rejected them all on engineering merits, not political ones.
If you've got newer, better ideas, I'm sure the engineers there would love to have you on board, as, after all, they aren't rejecting their current ideas based on political reasons, but for engineering reasons.
I didn't get that cartoon. What does it mean?
That's just what NASA wants to do...polute Mars with Seran wrap.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
::Stares at the picture a bit more::
Oh wait.
HAHAHAHA
Brilliant
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't know, I just thought I'd throw it out. It's quite possible they've thought about and rejected those sorts of solutions.
Really, I'm just hoping for some positive moderation so I can include a link to this post on my NASA job application.
Sounds a lot like what they use in motorcross.They have multiple layers on the goggles that can be pulled off. Also the cameras they put on race cars use this, but its a continuous roll.
Sure did. But since we have clear evidence of huge sand storms and propably smaller ones cleaning solar cells then maybe there was something wrong with NASAs wind tunnel setup? Did they simulate all aspects of martian atmosphere, the composition and temperature too?
The migrated from Houston/W. Broadway and are now working the crater for the holidays.
Well we're already polluting it with probes and extra craters ;)
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
Martian gravity is lower than Earth's, and dust should be lighter and hence easier to blow off. Or shake off - couldn't NASA have built in some way to have the vehicle shake itself like a dog? Or at least jerk forward, stop, jerk backwards. At which point the Martians would groan and wait for the probe to start spouting rap lyrics.
Well, I was actually thinking of something that didn't come completely off, but sat off to the side, either crinkled or rolled up. So it'd have to be stretched to cover the cells(hence the "tensioned" part of the original post)
the continues film on rollers idea another person posted is nice too. As long as the thing in front of the cells is clear, how bad can failure be? If it doesn't come off, it's no worse than if it weren't there.
you'd just have to be damn sure it didn't come off completely and jam in some other system, but i think that's true for just about every part of the rover.
A transparent layer of plastic which cycles around the cells (goes over the cells, through a slot in the panel, underneath, and back up through another slot) in a conveyor belt fashion. Underneath, you have an array of brushes to clean the belt.
Whenever it gets dirty, you just run the belt to clean it off.
Cheap, lightweight, reliable, and if it fails well then you have the same runtime as if you had no cleaning system at all, so zero overall loss.
Yep. works real well too. And it's very reliable in extreme conditions.
Of course we'd like the moderators to have some basic understanding of the topic, but we'd also like them to act in a manner representative of the /. crowd. Makes for an interesting dilemma.
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.
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...
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......
By "wee bit", you mean stronger by about 300% right? ;)
the martians simply grokked a wrongness with the dust on the panel.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.
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"
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.
They set up the chamber at Martian atmospheric pressure, then cranked up a fan to blow some insanely high wind speed. The fine dust on the floor didn't even budge; there just wasn't enough air to make anything happen.
Did they decrease the gravity also? Of course not. That's a huge factor right there. We have more than double the gravity of Mars.
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.
You're new here, aren't you? No, I am.
Its all politics, if the engineers had 100% say, they would have designed the bot to work on mars for 20-30years, even with dead batteries, just make it work in the day and smart software to know where its up to if it looses power.
I love it when somone just pulls stuff like this out of their ass and decides it's true. Why 20-30 years? As long as you're making stuff up, make it 100! Do I hear 1000? And it could run on cold fusion and and turn into a helicopter, too! Stupid politicians -- they ruin everything.
Why do people insist on acting like they know the inner workings of something like NASA when, in fact, they know precisely squat?
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
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!
it's those solar panel gnomes.
The problem with this idea is that it comes at the expense of efficiency. Plastic films absorb light. I'm sure that NASA has already done their best to minimize the thickness of any coatings or films to begin with and the energy saved by not having any films outweighs the energy lost over time by letting the panels get a little dirty.
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
SUPRISE! there's static electricity on Mars too
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
What about several layers of thin clear plastic that's tensioned? You have each layer held down with tabs,and release them one by one as the cells accumulate dust. The released plastic curls up at one end of the cells when released.
I work for Steve Squyres (the Principle Investigator) and he said that they considered this option as well, and it was prone to failure.
Looks like they made the right call after all!
Cheers,
Justin
...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
Yeah well, Beagle 2 kicked up a bit of dust when it.. erm... "landed" :O
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.)
So what youre trying to say is that the best way to amend this problem is to do nothing at all? Let it run its course and cripple the rover?
I can think of a couple small, low power solution that could be easily attempted. They are looking at the soil very close. It wouldnt be very hard to find soil or make soil similar to what is on Mars. Its absolutely amazing that they can softly drop a remote controlled robotic science lab on a rock 34 million miles away but they cant figure out how do make a small Martian windshield wiper. The benefits are undeniable.
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.
then why do they not take a cue from NASCAR and Motocross and have thin mylar tear offs on the panels? that technology has existed cince 1980.
one on each would ass less than 1/2 gram of weight and using one of the motors that already exists for folding the panels out to perform the tear off would solve the motor problem.
There really is no excuse except maybe that the materials available for the thin tear offs may reduce the output way too much or might react badly with the higher UV index there and yellow really quickly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Wonder if it is too ineffective to use an orbiting satellite(s) with solar panels and then beam the energy as microwaves down to the landers. For one the microwave receiver antenna assembly might be too big (I know pretty much nothing about this stuff anyway..), and if non-stationary satellites are used then the sending window might be too small for the required amount of energy.
Store with salt
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.
Consistent breeze might deposit, whereas gusts might end up removing...
Program Intellivision!
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* think there's a sympathetic Martian up there (Marvin, is that you?) holding a Squeegee and making faces at his mates behind the cameras.
:b
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
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:
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;)
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.