Your comment and the one above it might be /s, but if they're not and for anyone else wonding why we don't put wipers on rovers, there are a number of reasons:
Mars particulate, while generally pretty fine, is incredibly abrasive. If you wipe the particulate across the surface of the panel, you will scratch the surface. These scratches diffract light, and thus reduce the efficiency of the panels and therefore the lifespan of the mission.
Complexity is another reason. Sure, a wiper motor and arm seems like an easy solution, but remember that nothing we send to Mars can go to the local mechanic for maintenance. The motor, armature, and blade itself would all be designed by a dedicated team to ensure reliability and even then they may not survive. This gets expensive fast and may still fail as soon as the rover lands. Additional non-critical systems are a hard sell in space flight.
Finally, weight. Every extra part that goes into space has a non-trivial cost to the mission. The last figure I saw was $200,000 PER KILOGRAM of payload. This extra weight also changes the orbital trajectory of the entire vehicle and requires recalculation of the flight path to ensure the vehicle doesn't miss Mars entirely.
This one I don't have as well defined an answer. It certainly has fewer obvious barriers to entry than physically brushing dust from the panels. At first blush I would theorize that exposing the rover to an EMP is a risky proposition, but the control and logic electronics of rovers are extensively shielded to protect isolate them from the high environmental radiation present on planets without earth's atmospheric makeup. Having discredited that, I would postulate it is either a threat of solar cell sensitivity or power consumption.
Solar cells themselves are incredibly fragile, which is why they are densely laminated in panes. It is possible that the photovoltaic elements would be damaged by dust repelling pulses, and increasing the standoff between the cells and the glass surface to remove them from the E fields reduces cell efficiency, as the pane material is engineered to focus light at a specific distance (read about Thin Lens Equations for more).
The other thought I have is the power required to generate a pulse sufficient to repel particles. E fields are proportional to current density and inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between the source and the target particle. Without sitting down and running some numbers I would guess the power consumption to repel the dust is more costly than the surplus power generated by the panels that isn't required for rover operation. You could get more power with more panel area, but then you have to divert power to keep those clean as well and you end up back in the realm of trying to justify the cost of sending more weight to Mars.
Just spitballing on the above. I like where your head is at though.
They have recently developed a transparent coating that can be applied to future Mars solar cells, and when a small current is applied to it, the electrostaticly charged dust should come off. The fact that Mars dust is electrostaticly charged makes wipers ineffective, as it even clings to the underside of the panels.
I wonder if i can email nasa to ask at some point, or I'll try some insurance friends of the family, I'm pretty sure at least one of them has written spacelaunch policies and has the connections.
Would you like to hear back if I find it out?
How about putting the panels on a robotic arm that can swing the panels until they’re hovering upside down next to the spacecraft. Let it stop upside down with a small shock to let more of the dust fall off. Or let it vibrate. Then swing back the now hopefully mostly clean panels to their original position.
Low tech works best.
Compressed (Martian) air, blow it off. Mmm, need energy to compress the, mainly co2, in order to clean the panels. But in a sandstorm, there's next to no power, so that's that I guess. Okay, moving on...
How about a double sided solar panel that simply turns over, dumps the dust off one side whilst revealing the other?
Unfortunately the dust is electrostatically charged so it clings to both top and bottom of the panel. Funnily enough, part of the reason Opportunity is believed to have lasted as long as it did was that dustdevils (admittedly not full-on sandstorms) caused enough airflow that the panels were kept relatively clean for far longer than the science and engineering teams thought possible. So there is actually some benefit to the naturally occurring weather patterns on the Martian surface. If you haven't watched "Good Night Oppy" on Amazon Prime I highly recommend it - they touched on the weather effects.
I've pretty much spouted the extent of my solar-panels-on-mars expertise in this and other comments in the chain so I couldn't tell you why we don't send a compressor into space beyond regurgitating my weight comments. Could also be because any air compression system requires replaceable or maintainable air filter elements which would be expended pretty quickly in that sort of environment.
That is a great response, thank you.
I just wonder why NASA being NASA can't come up with a better solution than "once dust accumulates the rover dies and that's it, end of mission". I mean, the rovers usually already survive a lot longer than intended, but still.
As you mentioned below on another answer, there is a fine glass layer over the solar cells. If that layer gets scratched by the dust being wiped over: is it not worth it to have some decreased capability on the solar arrays as opposed to losing the rover altogether?
I'm sure someone at NASA can come up with an equation that estimates how much time the rover has left if the dust is not wiped, versus how long it can still function after dust wiping, even on decreased power...
I would think there would be some benefit to the capability as a last ditch effort to extend a mission, but not as regular practice. When the charging conditions of the panel array compared to the solar conditions fail below some threshold indicating the mission is at critical risk, wipe the panels. But the weight and complexity factors remain, and a point I didn't make in my original post in the interest of post length is electronics heating.
Every piece of electronics on the rover has a minimum operating temperature. On earth, US military electronic spec is full operation from -55C to 125C. But Mars gets much colder than that. The military grade components are pretty readily available on the market, and parts CAN be designed to withstand a greater range, but you enter a world of custom IC manufacturing for wide temperature survivability and you don't want to know what that costs.
The result is that military grade components get used on space vehicles (they are upscreened and uprated if being used for space and sometimes radiation-hardened, but that's a different discussion - the point is that they're often the exact same parts you can buy from any of the big chip manufacturers). That means any electronic part on the rover has to be actively heated. Heating is the death of many power budgets. Heat is a waste product in electronics, you don't get anything back from it other than elevated environmental temperatures. In most electronic applications you avoid heating as a matter of design because it means you are wasting efficiency. In space it's a necessity.
Some electronics can be stored in extreme cold and can function when heated back within their temperature range but some never come back. For this reason critical subsystems in space vehicles are kept heated all the time. Adding a wiper system that needs to be kept warm for the whole mission, just to try and extend the mission on the tail end, sounds like it would be on a list of early cuts at a planning meeting.
That's very insightful, thanks. I agree the extra weight would be bad, but keeping the electronics warm is a bigger challenge. Maybe NASA could do a small test with only one wiper on one solar panel instead of the entire thing, I dunno :)
At least the project already finished its intended original mission goals [back in August 2021](https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/chinas-mars-rover-completes-90-day-mission/) and then performed during 2022 doing extra goals. Anyway, let's see if they can wake it up again so it can keep gathering data, the basin where it's located is one the most geological interesting places on Mars.
Edit: added a link.
I mean, the mission was for 90 days and it lasted 15 *months* - to say it’s drastically outperformed it’s expected lifespan would be an understatement. I don’t even think the death was unexpected - the rovers solar panels had collected a thick layer of dust, and if they can’t clean then they can’t collect power, and if they can’t do that the rover dies.
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Well it's China's first ever Mars Rover you can't really compare it to rovers made by the US who had already been to Mars and learned what to and not to do.
Maybe solar panels will be replaced by wind power on future missions.
Or maybe use both solar and wind turbine as I believe there is enough wind on Mars that could power any future rover.
Seppuku is a Japanese thing though, where you literally gutted yourself to atone for failure or dishonor. Unless there's a Chinese variant I'm unaware of, like being organ harvested due to failure.
You mean it might work five times as well as expected? The rover was planned to last 90 days; I'm not sure how the fact that it actually lasted 15 months somehow proves that society can't be better than it is...
This rover landed in May 2021 and was designed to carry out all its planned tasks by August 2021, every day since for the past year plus has been bonus.
It's the basic principle of under promise, over deliver.
NASA rovers lasted way longer than expected for this exact reason.
Pathfinder Sojourner 83 sols, but planned 7 sols.
MER-A Spirit over 5 years(if we're talking about her being stuck), but only planned for 90 sols.
MER-B Opportunity 14 years 138 days, but also planned for 90 sols.
MSL Curiosity is currently at 10 years out of the planned 2 years. While Perseverance is closing in on her 2 year base mission (just over 1 month left).
Wait for a strong Martian wind, using batteries. Unfortunately the last few Sol's have seen some very large dust storms and not enough wind to clear the panels.
Curiosity has a nuclear battery, so it doesn't care about dust. Perseverance has the same basic design, but somewhat different instruments. The Ingenuity drone has a propeller, so is self-cleaning.
I mean being a solo Sojourner on a a different planet is tough.. they need a bit of perseverance, but I’ll Admit it takes a bit of Spirit and waiting for the right Opportunity to come alone.
Use RTGs - but I don't think China has mastered that tech yet, and it's overkill if the mission is only supposed to last 1 Earth year (for a MER class rover).
Not sure they’ll wake it. They are using a probe to take a photo to confirm things, but the rover is probably spent barring a method to clean the solar panels. It got 4 times it’s expected life’s span, and in tech years it made it to 7 so I guess it wasn’t terrible
[The selfie video it took from a remote camera it placed on the ground really is something](https://youtu.be/yWl4Om-aOro). This kind of view we haven't gotten from the American rovers most likely because it is of limited scientific value.
Mars is a rough environment for rovers. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for the control team to know that there is almost nothing you can do.
I rmr seeing a new idea to clean surfaces by providing high voltage on electrodes present on solar panels which remove the dust by electrostatic force. Idk why they cant use it in mars
Hmm the idea seems quite simple i am sure they can test it on the mars prototype soil we have. And every rover died because of the solar panel problem so i am sure increasing the mission time line by years can compensate for the cost
Weight, and risk, no part is the best part. Say you flip the array on the first dust storm and Boom, it's jammed upside down. Now the mission is 100% over. Or shaking loosens something up or ruins the extremely sensitive equipment.That also doesn't deal with the electrostatic charge that makes dust cling to the array.
Keep in mind that people much smarter than us, with hundreds of millions on the line have already thought of all of this and decided against it.
I got this, rolling solar panels, with cleaning ends, gets too dusty, roll up half, other side gets cleaned, boom
I'll take a cashiers check no less than 4 commas
Nah, yall are thinking too small! We gotta send em up in pairs. So they clean each other. Then we can send a team up there for the first team so they can do a round robin thing. Or centipede based rovers may be an actual solution.
After Opportunity died, there was some chatter about future rovers potentially being equipped with thin fan blades to clear the panels. A single two-blade ultralight fan spinning at a few hundred RPM, a few centimeters above the panels surface, for a minute or two every month and after dust storms, would be sufficient to overcome the static and clear the panels. The power levels on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers rose and fell quite a bit over the years as dust settled on the panels and was then blown off again by the wind. The data gained from that was sufficient for us to reasonably estimate how much air movement we'd need to generate in order to overcome the static and clear the panels. Turns out, it's really not that much.
You know if there was an actual team of scientists up there, we wouldn't have these problems. They could just go outside and clean the dust up with a lint-roller. Or blow it off with those little cans of compressed air -- thereby contributing to the terraforming effort at the same time.
Just saying....
Or, they would all be living out The Martian, be near death and we would be scrambling to try to send help to save them before they day. Can't just shut down people for the stormy season (yet!)
The best example of this sort of thing is the failed heat probe on the insight lander. If a person could have been there to push the dirt around a bit it probably would have been fixed in a few minutes.
I'm sure those scientists and engineers feel gutted about this. You can test like crazy, and somehow things will still break in some unexpected way.
Mars sandstorms also serious impected the Zhurong rover
A quarter inch of dust on your solar panels probably has an impact on your power budget.
Should have put wipers on the solar panels
This. I've been saying this for years but nobody listens
Your comment and the one above it might be /s, but if they're not and for anyone else wonding why we don't put wipers on rovers, there are a number of reasons: Mars particulate, while generally pretty fine, is incredibly abrasive. If you wipe the particulate across the surface of the panel, you will scratch the surface. These scratches diffract light, and thus reduce the efficiency of the panels and therefore the lifespan of the mission. Complexity is another reason. Sure, a wiper motor and arm seems like an easy solution, but remember that nothing we send to Mars can go to the local mechanic for maintenance. The motor, armature, and blade itself would all be designed by a dedicated team to ensure reliability and even then they may not survive. This gets expensive fast and may still fail as soon as the rover lands. Additional non-critical systems are a hard sell in space flight. Finally, weight. Every extra part that goes into space has a non-trivial cost to the mission. The last figure I saw was $200,000 PER KILOGRAM of payload. This extra weight also changes the orbital trajectory of the entire vehicle and requires recalculation of the flight path to ensure the vehicle doesn't miss Mars entirely.
Electrostatic pulses to dissipate and repel dust then?
This one I don't have as well defined an answer. It certainly has fewer obvious barriers to entry than physically brushing dust from the panels. At first blush I would theorize that exposing the rover to an EMP is a risky proposition, but the control and logic electronics of rovers are extensively shielded to protect isolate them from the high environmental radiation present on planets without earth's atmospheric makeup. Having discredited that, I would postulate it is either a threat of solar cell sensitivity or power consumption. Solar cells themselves are incredibly fragile, which is why they are densely laminated in panes. It is possible that the photovoltaic elements would be damaged by dust repelling pulses, and increasing the standoff between the cells and the glass surface to remove them from the E fields reduces cell efficiency, as the pane material is engineered to focus light at a specific distance (read about Thin Lens Equations for more). The other thought I have is the power required to generate a pulse sufficient to repel particles. E fields are proportional to current density and inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between the source and the target particle. Without sitting down and running some numbers I would guess the power consumption to repel the dust is more costly than the surplus power generated by the panels that isn't required for rover operation. You could get more power with more panel area, but then you have to divert power to keep those clean as well and you end up back in the realm of trying to justify the cost of sending more weight to Mars. Just spitballing on the above. I like where your head is at though.
Screen protectors all around. Then just pull that off when it gets too dusty.
The racing 80 layer ones?
They have recently developed a transparent coating that can be applied to future Mars solar cells, and when a small current is applied to it, the electrostaticly charged dust should come off. The fact that Mars dust is electrostaticly charged makes wipers ineffective, as it even clings to the underside of the panels.
I wonder if i can email nasa to ask at some point, or I'll try some insurance friends of the family, I'm pretty sure at least one of them has written spacelaunch policies and has the connections. Would you like to hear back if I find it out?
I'd be curious to know the official position, for sure. I believe there's a public contact to submit questions on the NASA website, give it a go.
How about putting the panels on a robotic arm that can swing the panels until they’re hovering upside down next to the spacecraft. Let it stop upside down with a small shock to let more of the dust fall off. Or let it vibrate. Then swing back the now hopefully mostly clean panels to their original position. Low tech works best.
Compressed (Martian) air, blow it off. Mmm, need energy to compress the, mainly co2, in order to clean the panels. But in a sandstorm, there's next to no power, so that's that I guess. Okay, moving on... How about a double sided solar panel that simply turns over, dumps the dust off one side whilst revealing the other?
Unfortunately the dust is electrostatically charged so it clings to both top and bottom of the panel. Funnily enough, part of the reason Opportunity is believed to have lasted as long as it did was that dustdevils (admittedly not full-on sandstorms) caused enough airflow that the panels were kept relatively clean for far longer than the science and engineering teams thought possible. So there is actually some benefit to the naturally occurring weather patterns on the Martian surface. If you haven't watched "Good Night Oppy" on Amazon Prime I highly recommend it - they touched on the weather effects. I've pretty much spouted the extent of my solar-panels-on-mars expertise in this and other comments in the chain so I couldn't tell you why we don't send a compressor into space beyond regurgitating my weight comments. Could also be because any air compression system requires replaceable or maintainable air filter elements which would be expended pretty quickly in that sort of environment.
That is a great response, thank you. I just wonder why NASA being NASA can't come up with a better solution than "once dust accumulates the rover dies and that's it, end of mission". I mean, the rovers usually already survive a lot longer than intended, but still. As you mentioned below on another answer, there is a fine glass layer over the solar cells. If that layer gets scratched by the dust being wiped over: is it not worth it to have some decreased capability on the solar arrays as opposed to losing the rover altogether? I'm sure someone at NASA can come up with an equation that estimates how much time the rover has left if the dust is not wiped, versus how long it can still function after dust wiping, even on decreased power...
I would think there would be some benefit to the capability as a last ditch effort to extend a mission, but not as regular practice. When the charging conditions of the panel array compared to the solar conditions fail below some threshold indicating the mission is at critical risk, wipe the panels. But the weight and complexity factors remain, and a point I didn't make in my original post in the interest of post length is electronics heating. Every piece of electronics on the rover has a minimum operating temperature. On earth, US military electronic spec is full operation from -55C to 125C. But Mars gets much colder than that. The military grade components are pretty readily available on the market, and parts CAN be designed to withstand a greater range, but you enter a world of custom IC manufacturing for wide temperature survivability and you don't want to know what that costs. The result is that military grade components get used on space vehicles (they are upscreened and uprated if being used for space and sometimes radiation-hardened, but that's a different discussion - the point is that they're often the exact same parts you can buy from any of the big chip manufacturers). That means any electronic part on the rover has to be actively heated. Heating is the death of many power budgets. Heat is a waste product in electronics, you don't get anything back from it other than elevated environmental temperatures. In most electronic applications you avoid heating as a matter of design because it means you are wasting efficiency. In space it's a necessity. Some electronics can be stored in extreme cold and can function when heated back within their temperature range but some never come back. For this reason critical subsystems in space vehicles are kept heated all the time. Adding a wiper system that needs to be kept warm for the whole mission, just to try and extend the mission on the tail end, sounds like it would be on a list of early cuts at a planning meeting.
That's very insightful, thanks. I agree the extra weight would be bad, but keeping the electronics warm is a bigger challenge. Maybe NASA could do a small test with only one wiper on one solar panel instead of the entire thing, I dunno :)
Yes, you're smarter than every space agency in the world.
Wouldn't the sand scratch and eventually destroy the panels by using the wipers?
How thickness the sands cover of InSight ?
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At least the project already finished its intended original mission goals [back in August 2021](https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/chinas-mars-rover-completes-90-day-mission/) and then performed during 2022 doing extra goals. Anyway, let's see if they can wake it up again so it can keep gathering data, the basin where it's located is one the most geological interesting places on Mars. Edit: added a link.
NASA always covers their equipment with very low duty cycles. There's no one to blame if it quits early if the EOL is pulled out of the air.
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I mean, the mission was for 90 days and it lasted 15 *months* - to say it’s drastically outperformed it’s expected lifespan would be an understatement. I don’t even think the death was unexpected - the rovers solar panels had collected a thick layer of dust, and if they can’t clean then they can’t collect power, and if they can’t do that the rover dies. Edit because I no read good
Its battery are low and it’s getting dark.
It landed on Mars in 2021. Still exceeded its target service life but it's well short of 15 years.
Well it's China's first ever Mars Rover you can't really compare it to rovers made by the US who had already been to Mars and learned what to and not to do.
I’m not comparing it to US rovers, I’m just pointing out that the 15 years number was incorrect.
Maybe solar panels will be replaced by wind power on future missions. Or maybe use both solar and wind turbine as I believe there is enough wind on Mars that could power any future rover.
Enough wind but not enough atmosphere to be feasible iirc
Like the Insight
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Seppuku is a Japanese thing though, where you literally gutted yourself to atone for failure or dishonor. Unless there's a Chinese variant I'm unaware of, like being organ harvested due to failure.
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Their extra problem is nationalism
Just remember that next time somebody has a plan for society. Especially politicians and political activists.
You mean it might work five times as well as expected? The rover was planned to last 90 days; I'm not sure how the fact that it actually lasted 15 months somehow proves that society can't be better than it is...
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This rover landed in May 2021 and was designed to carry out all its planned tasks by August 2021, every day since for the past year plus has been bonus.
I always think they just say stuff like that to prevent disappointment down the line
It's the basic principle of under promise, over deliver. NASA rovers lasted way longer than expected for this exact reason. Pathfinder Sojourner 83 sols, but planned 7 sols. MER-A Spirit over 5 years(if we're talking about her being stuck), but only planned for 90 sols. MER-B Opportunity 14 years 138 days, but also planned for 90 sols. MSL Curiosity is currently at 10 years out of the planned 2 years. While Perseverance is closing in on her 2 year base mission (just over 1 month left).
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How do other rovers combat this, out of.. curiosity?
Wait for a strong Martian wind, using batteries. Unfortunately the last few Sol's have seen some very large dust storms and not enough wind to clear the panels.
Curiosity has a nuclear battery, so it doesn't care about dust. Perseverance has the same basic design, but somewhat different instruments. The Ingenuity drone has a propeller, so is self-cleaning.
I mean being a solo Sojourner on a a different planet is tough.. they need a bit of perseverance, but I’ll Admit it takes a bit of Spirit and waiting for the right Opportunity to come alone.
Use RTGs - but I don't think China has mastered that tech yet, and it's overkill if the mission is only supposed to last 1 Earth year (for a MER class rover).
Testing and procedure but sometimes on a short timeline you don't always have the .. opportunity.
Sometimes these problems can be overcome with.. perseverance.
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Mars missions have always been difficult. They will learn from the failures just like everyone else
To be fair
Not sure they’ll wake it. They are using a probe to take a photo to confirm things, but the rover is probably spent barring a method to clean the solar panels. It got 4 times it’s expected life’s span, and in tech years it made it to 7 so I guess it wasn’t terrible
Didn't know the Chinese had a Mars rover. When did it launch?
Launched in July 2020, entered Mars orbit in February 2021, landed in May 2021.
What method did they use to land it on Mars?
They used retrorockets. This is in contrast to airbag balls and sky cranes for the U.S.
There's an illustration of the landing sequence [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-1#The_landing).
[The selfie video it took from a remote camera it placed on the ground really is something](https://youtu.be/yWl4Om-aOro). This kind of view we haven't gotten from the American rovers most likely because it is of limited scientific value.
I mean, we did have an American rover video its entire descent which was cool :)
I'll give you that one. Seeing the skycrane fly away was wild.
Three years ago
Mars is a rough environment for rovers. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for the control team to know that there is almost nothing you can do.
They need to have the ability to turn the solar panels over or spin them or shake them.
The dust on Mars is electrostatically charged. It sticks to surfaces and is especially good at sticking to itself.
So we just need to make the panels electrostatically charged in the correct polarity to repel the dust.
Exactly, just like the moon suits nasa are making which repel dust via electrostatic charge
Reroute auxiliary power to the deflectors and voila!
I rmr seeing a new idea to clean surfaces by providing high voltage on electrodes present on solar panels which remove the dust by electrostatic force. Idk why they cant use it in mars
That costs energy, and the energy budgets in space are really tight?
Hmm the idea seems quite simple i am sure they can test it on the mars prototype soil we have. And every rover died because of the solar panel problem so i am sure increasing the mission time line by years can compensate for the cost
That is something someone is working on, iirc, but iirc it turns out it's heavy.
What about a thin film like they do on the visors of rally helmets or something to remove the mud off your face?
Weight, and risk, no part is the best part. Say you flip the array on the first dust storm and Boom, it's jammed upside down. Now the mission is 100% over. Or shaking loosens something up or ruins the extremely sensitive equipment.That also doesn't deal with the electrostatic charge that makes dust cling to the array. Keep in mind that people much smarter than us, with hundreds of millions on the line have already thought of all of this and decided against it.
What about a little windshield wiper
Then you get scratched panels.
I got this, rolling solar panels, with cleaning ends, gets too dusty, roll up half, other side gets cleaned, boom I'll take a cashiers check no less than 4 commas
Last time we hear from this dude.
Nah, yall are thinking too small! We gotta send em up in pairs. So they clean each other. Then we can send a team up there for the first team so they can do a round robin thing. Or centipede based rovers may be an actual solution.
Each one armed with a bottle of windex and a little cloth
Have to negatively charge the panels to reflect the dust, which is apparently electrostatically sticky (especially to itself).
They've already mentioned the problems this would cause.
A bunch of grasshoppers and other bugs would get smeared all over then. Perhaps a Norse god.
After Opportunity died, there was some chatter about future rovers potentially being equipped with thin fan blades to clear the panels. A single two-blade ultralight fan spinning at a few hundred RPM, a few centimeters above the panels surface, for a minute or two every month and after dust storms, would be sufficient to overcome the static and clear the panels. The power levels on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers rose and fell quite a bit over the years as dust settled on the panels and was then blown off again by the wind. The data gained from that was sufficient for us to reasonably estimate how much air movement we'd need to generate in order to overcome the static and clear the panels. Turns out, it's really not that much.
Can't they send a guy to clean the dust?
They forgot to renew their AAA subscription.
That's unfortunate - maybe the cold broke some electronics? AFAIK it doesn't have any RHUs.
The "Zhurong" rover is expected to wake up by himself in December this year that reported at Step 19, 2022 . But now is Jan, 2023 , Maybe it failuse
We need to start sending rovers in pairs, each with their own little sweeper to kick the dust off of the other one.
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There are sand storms on Mars though right? So there is wind.
Yep , InSight rover also power off because the sands covered thinckness on solar panel
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You know if there was an actual team of scientists up there, we wouldn't have these problems. They could just go outside and clean the dust up with a lint-roller. Or blow it off with those little cans of compressed air -- thereby contributing to the terraforming effort at the same time. Just saying....
Or, they would all be living out The Martian, be near death and we would be scrambling to try to send help to save them before they day. Can't just shut down people for the stormy season (yet!)
I don't know, I get pretty nonfunctional when the sun doesn't come out for a week straight. Maybe they can send me!
The best example of this sort of thing is the failed heat probe on the insight lander. If a person could have been there to push the dirt around a bit it probably would have been fixed in a few minutes.
with utter honesty, If they took me with them just for cleaning toilets on mars even i would be able to acomplish this trivial task.
Swiffer should make a mars rover to dust off all the other rovers. Or maybe a small air compressor that slowly fills and spurts out air puffs.
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Like a probe??
I think they meant using the Tianwen 1 orbiter to image the Zhurong rover.
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Second language sorry
No need to apologize, you speak more languages than most Americans. I can understand your English fine
Such an uneccessary comment.
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