Why no cleaning system for the solar cells?
Because they’re not designed to last long enough to need one. Furthermore, adding a cleaning system would mean leaving off one, or possibly more, of the scientific instruments.
If the dust gets blown off, does it wake up ?
Sometimes.
Ingenuity completes 40th flight:
Percy finishes a sample depot (10 tubes)
Brian
Do you have a cite for this? they could use a rotating screen in a fashion similar to race car cameras. Not a lot of mass involved.
I don’t have a cite. But the nominal lifespan of most space probes is usually pretty short. For example, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers had a nominal lifespan of 90 sols (Martian days). If they last that long, the mission is considered a success.
Of course, everyone knows they’ll virtually always last longer, usually many times longer. But if there’s something they could add which will only be used in an extended mission, they generally won’t add it.
NASA has a pretty good track record as these things go. maybe they’ll add a cleaner for the solar cells down the line. When you consider what it takes to get a piece of equipment to Mars it’s certainly worth the effort to get the most out of it. Basically it’ s a fully functioning rover except for dirt.
I’m not sure this would work, but maybe if they hovered the helicopter over the rover for a while, it would blow the dust off. After all, whirlwinds have removed some of the dust from rovers at times.
That might actually work. There are coatings that resist dirt so it would just roll off. A seriously good idea.
The problem is static charge. The dust sticks electrostatically to the surfaces. It’s also much finer than the stuff that passes for dust on Earth. Plus the thin atmosphere & low gravity. Which collectively mean the relative effectiveness of wind, gravity, and electrostatic forces are very different than our Earth-based intuition.
I guess one of the auks finally got it. Darn shame.
Still, to get 71 completed flights from the thing is a miracle.
I just saw the above old discussion about having some kind of a dust wiper system on rovers. This question was addressed in the February 2024 issue of Astronomy magazine by Jim Bell, Principal Investigator for Mars 2020 Mastcam. He basically says it’s not done because it would involve trading off some more important instrument for no reason, since the rovers already last well past their design lifetime without a wiper:
… [I]f a team wants to add a dust wiper blade to a rover solar panel, the engineers will say, “Sure we can do that! But what do you want to trade to accommodate the mass, volume, power needs, and cost of that wiper system?” Hmm… would the team be OK, for example, trading a backup radio transmitter for that wiper system? Or dropping one of the science instruments for it? In my experience, we’ve decided not to make such trades because we felt confident that the rovers could survive the required minimum lifetime even with dusty solar panels.
Yay!
It’s still possible that it won’t fly again. The comms cutout could have been due to a hard landing, or something else entirely. But hey, it’s not actually dead yet.
While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing, and it is no longer capable of flight.
I do think that the fact that NASA missions tend to last so much longer than their “official design lifetime”* is a sign of poor engineering of some sort or another. If they really can last that long, then they should be designing the mission to use all that longevity.
*When they don’t fail immediately, of course. But failures at the start of missions don’t, in general, demonstrate anything other than the fact that space is very hard.
The missions are using all that longevity; they keep doing science until they just can’t anymore. The devices are designed with a big safety margin to make sure they last long enough to complete all the designated primary mission goals, but those designated goals are selected from the team’s wishlist of stuff they want to try. Just because the stuff they do after the primary goals are met didn’t originally make the cut doesn’t mean they don’t have contingency plans for doing it (plus other tests suggested by the data they get back and the circumstances of the probe).