Gordon D. Pusch wrote:
(groutch) writes:

I was wondering why NASA accepts a shortened life for the Mars Rovers
due to "dust build-up on the solar panels".

Is cleaning them beyond their rocket scientists ?

Cleaning hyper-fine dust off of darned near _anything_ is MUCH harder
than you apparently realize.

I ( as far as you know ) realise nothing. I was merely asking a
question about the abilities of NASA.

NASA was unable to find a good way to
clean hyper-fine moondust off the Apollo astronaut's space-suits,
so that dust accumulation was already causing severe problems in the
spacesuit glove/wrist joints after only a few days --- and mars dust
appears to be even "stickier" than moondust, perhaps because there is
just _barely_ enough water in it to make it "muddy."

Apollo was more than 30 years ago - I think it is time NASA invested
more money in fixing this sort of boring (to some) problem than
spending billions on doing whatever Earth observation happens to be
trendy at the moment. One student's paper does not constitute an
attempt at a fix.


Credit where credit is due, though: NASA learnt from previous mistakes
and used technology ( the 256 tones ) to let them know what, if
anything, was going wrong with a probe that might well have failed.
( Don't know how well it worked ? - they seem scared of using big
words on their web site).

Brickbats where brickbats are due: If only ESA had invested in ( a
copy of ) that technology, Beagle might have provided something for
future missions, instead of a big, "we only had 65 million dollars",
Nada. ( No idea about Mars Express's success - the ESA website is
SH... less than up-to-date ).


Groutch.