

A Mars rover  (Source: NASA)

The discovery made on the Red Planet  (Source: NASA)
The Mars rovers continue to impress






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RE: A Testament to Good Engineering
By Aiserou on 12/12/2007 4:58:42 PM , Rating: 2
Side note: Why didn't they put a "solar panel wiper" on the thing? One would think a remote controlled rubber squeegee wouldn't have been too big of a design issue, compared to the 100 million mile voyage and all...

Solar panels aren't a smooth surface, you can't squeegee them without potentially ripping out individual cells. You could put a glass cover over them,, but that would add a lot of weight, a lot more design issues since the panels were designed to fold out, and glass is pretty fragile for things like take-off, re-entry, and bouncing across the terrain in a balloon. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's certainly not as trivial as it sounds.

By ChristopherO on 12/12/2007 6:36:19 PM , Rating: 2
I was thinking acrylic. You could have a track running the length of the panel on both sides, once per day a buffing device could make a single pass over the surface. This presumes rectangular panels, or a buffer that could expand over a surface of varying width.

Even a small high-rpm blower might work. I know the atmospheric density is much lower, but it seems like there are thousands of possible solutions given that dust-on-the-panels seems to be the biggest problem with long-term survivability. It doesn't need to be squeaky clean, just "enough."

The only thing I can think of is that they really did build it for 90-days and are genuinely stunned they made it this long. I can't blame them; we can't reliably predict hurricanes on our own planet. I'm thinking Martian weather is a bit touchier.


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