China's Mars rover hibernates for a scarily long time China’s Zhurong Mars rover may be struggling to emerge from sleep mode, a feat it was expected to accomplish around December 26th. Zhurong went into hibernation in May 2022, a year after it landed on the red planet. The rover has been waiting for Mars' winter and attendant sandstorms to pass before resuming its exploration of …
Mars is not a nice place for solar-powered missions. Apart from the distinct possibility that the solar panels have been covered with too much dust, another possibility is that the intense cold during the Martian winter (temperatures could easily drop to -100C in even lower) has damaged something that the rover needs to help it wake up.
On the over hand, congratulations to the Chinese for getting a rover on the surface of Mars in one piece; that's a tricky thing to do at the best of times.
I was just gonna say "Space is Hard"
and of course you said better things
Is it time yet (in the world) for space tech patents and scientific discoveries to (in general) be made PUBLIC if they are not already?
Patent licensing of course must still apply, but be made available for legit non-military purposes like Mars rovers.
Just a thought, world politics and CCP notwithstanding.
If dust gets the better of all these rovers, why have none of them tried a mitigation?
For example the ability to rotate a panel upside down so some of the dust falls off.
Or if it has a robot arm, add a brush element on the back of it and a pre-defined sequence to brush at least one panel every month, or something.
Even if success is speculative, there comes a point where trying it is better than a dead rover.
It's not rocket science :)
This has been considered a few times now.
The short form is that the added weight, power-use and complexity of a dust-cleaning system doesn't work out as worthwhile compared to the simplest alternative - just starting with more solar panels than you 'need'.
Since the dust reduces the effectiveness of the panels, adding more means you can get your required power levels for longer. Panels are fairly light, and have very few (or even no) moving parts to jam or fail.
When so much of the cost is fuel, you want to save every gram of payload for Actual Science, so lighter is better. Simpler things fail less often - you don't want to drop a science experiment to launch/power a windscreenwiper only to have the damn thing jam millions of miles from the nearest mechanic.
Indeed, the mission objective was 90 days which it managed with ease. Anything beyond the objectives is a bonus - nice to have but not worth wasting valuable space to achieve.
The "dust problem" is not a problem, dust has never stopped a mission from completing the mission objectives.
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Oddly enough, real bona fide rocket scientists have looked at this.
As Forbes.com says succinctly:
Martian dust is extremely small and fine-grained. Atmospheric dust on Mars is approximately three microns in diameter, and adheres via electrostatic forces. You can't just "brush it off" like you would on Earth; much dust would remain.
There's more at this stackexchange answer: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32445/can-the-mars-landers-rovers-solar-panels-be-cleaned
It's a perennial topic. Its covered quite well in this Space.com article: Can we save Mars robots from death by dust? (I hope Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't apply)
windshield wipers in space!
flying squeegee helicopters!
yeah, maybe not...
compressed air jets may be the best solution. Build up pressure in a tank, then spray the panel every few days. You can pump atmosphere at Mars pressure, and it should not take that long. A small multi-stage compressor should do it. Probably could he made out of light materials, maybe even plastic.
This leads me to wonder whether coating the panels in a thin conductive film, and earthing (marsing?) this via a probe into the ground, or one of those earthing strips you used to see on the backs of cars in the '90s when gullible people thought static electricity made them car sick, might work.
I can't imagine a layer a few microns thick would significantly affect the efficiency of the solar cells underneath.
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