I'm just curious...I understand that both of our Martian rovers will loose power and go dark from a combination of low sunlight and dust buildup.....While we can't do anything about a lack of sunlight, we certainly could have built in a wisk broom onto the robotic arm to sweep away dust....Is it just me..??? Why not?...

For my money I'd be satisfied with live pictures as the rovers go racing around Mars for a few years. I think that the chances of finding life at 1 inch per hour are pretty slim. Imagine if ET had landed at the equator... looking specifically for ice.

Water..?

Manned Missions..???...Hmmmm?..Challenger, Columbia.....Mars???

Robotic Missions are just dandy...!!!

Is it me, or does the old/new moon base idea floated by Dubya sound like nukes in space?...A clear no nukes in space treaty violation......

Let's work on Warp Drive first, or at least a better flavor of TANG.....

I also thought it would be good to have a dust sweeper attachment for the robot arm.

I suspect that the reason against it is that the budget didn't include money for the manpower to do continuing operations.

I also expect that the diamond rock abbrasion tool will work a limited number of times before it becomes worn out and useless.

If there were a cheap way to send and receive data, I'm sure you could get a team of volunteers to play with the rover for as many years as it can last.

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The rovers will lose power eventually anyway, because the solar cells degrade over time, so the rovers wouldn't be running around for years even if they could clean the solar panels.

Then there's manpower limitations. The amount of people needed to keep this project running are all forcing themselves to live on martian time, which might cause health problems and loss of efficiency if continued for indefinite periods of time.

Then you have money limitations. You still have to pay all the people to do what they do, and I suspect NASA isn't made out of money.

There are probably a lot of other factors that haven't been taken into consideration, I'm just giving you an idea of what kind of hurdles NASA is already leaping to make this work

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The visions we present to our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. - Carl Sagan, 1992

I don't see why it would be so impractical to have installed a device that fires out compressed air or even carbon dioxide gathered from the Martian atmosphere over the cells as they collected dust. The advantage to this is clear. Given that there is always a threat of a large dust storm that could coat the rover with high levels of dust it seems prudent to me to include such a device on any future long-range rovers.

Well, I would certainly hope that by the next lander they have added something like a windshield wiper or two. Such a mechanism is relatively inexpensive and would not add much to the cost of the project. It would probably earn its' cost back during the primary mission time frame by helping keep the solar panels generating more power than they would otherwise. That extra power could be put to use in taking and transmitting more pictures and driving further deep into the primary mission, not to mention how it could extend the extended mission. Right now the rovers are starting to conserve energy and cut back on the amount of work they can do each day. Some of that is due to the dust collecting on the solar panels and that part of the equation could be largely restored with the use of some simple wiper blades. They only need to use the things perhaps once a month for a minute or two.

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~\_/~\_O
Burmese

Exactly - especially helpful too when it rains!

Hello ... hello? .... helloooo???

Where did everybody go? :blink:

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Regs, Paul.
(Stargazer)
http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/stargazer

It might be necessary to use some kind of compresser to blow the dust off. I have the impression that the air pressure on Mars is low enough that the wiper couldn't lift the dust with the leading turbulence, and so would drag the dust across the surface of the solar panels scraping and gouging all the way. Certainly we wouldn't be sending wiper fluid.

A similar effect made the later parts of the EVAs for the Apollo 17 astronauts.

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