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Mars Rover Spirit Reaches Winter Tilt
An anonymous reader writes "The Mars rover Spirit has been inching carefully down the north slope of the feature 'Home Plate' to tilt its solar panels into the sun to survive the long Martian winter. On Friday, it reached a tilt of 29.9 degrees, probably the final tilt it will reach for the winter. Although it's used the tilt strategy to increase power over the Martian winter twice before, this year it's especially critical, since a global dust storm last summer has left the solar-powered rover covered with dust and starved for power. Geoffrey Landis, one of the MER scientists, commemorated Spirit's trek to the winter haven with a sonnet on his blog. (The second of the two rovers, Opportunity, is at a landing site that's not as far into the southern hemisphere, and hence has less need to find a tilted surface.) OSU has a website explaining some of the software used to visualize the terrain to optimize the tilt, and for the latest news, the ongoing log of the rover status is updated weekly."
A quick Google isn't turning up anything authoritative, but from memory:
For the original 90 day mission length, running out of juice due to dusty panels would not have been a concern. It would have just been another thing to break and would have added to the mass of the rover, quite possibly costing valuable capacity for other scientific tools.
[insert rant about how some of that war budget could do wonders for NASA]
- More Moving Parts
- Weight
- Dust too fine to be brushed off easilly
- Chance to actually reduce power generation on failure by blocking the solar panels
- Needs power itself
And all this aside from the fact that asking someone to make a solar panel wiper for Mars is going to be an enormously expensive and involved operation. Windspeeds, airpressure, particle count, gravity, temperature all play a part in this. And anyone using windshield wipers on their car knows how unreliable they are to begin with.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Dear mods - Please learn the difference between "I do not agree, you have offended my delicate sensitivities", from "Troll" and "Flamebait".
Though confusingly similar to the untrained eye, people can legitimately disagree with your personal worldview without trolling.
Although metamoderation almost always vindicates me, and I couldn't care less about my karma ("excellent", BTW) I do find it somewhat discouraging that zealots (whether religious, political, or Apple) manage to silence any discussion on topics they don't like by modding to below the default visible threshold.
If you disagree with me, say so. You might even convince me of the error of my ways. Modding me down just reinforces the view that those who silently disagree with me really have no rational arguments worth hearing.