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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."
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.
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.
> Dupe from Yesterday
Yeah, but the panels are still being cleaned today!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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...
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
Something is cleaning the editor's memory of the past. Too bad it doesn't work more quickly.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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
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.
I'm sure the Mars Lander's mom came in, yelled at him for moving so slowly, and sleeping most of the day, then cleaned his solar panels, and left in a huff....
Brilliant!
Error 407 - No creative sig found
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.