[X] My Assistant

[pioneer]

At the beginning of their missions, both Spirit and Opportunity generated 800 watts of power. I did some searching from the web, and the solar panels I found sold commercially only generate 125 watts at most. I'm far from being an expert in solar power, but how could the solar panels on MER generate far more power on Mars than ones available here on Earth? Does NASA have more advanced solar panels that are not available commercially?

[edstrick]

One of the zillion things I wish the rovers had is a real thermal infrared camera. They did take some MiniTES data, don't know about images, at night for surface physical properties analysis. The heating up/cooling down curves tell a lot about grain size and/or cementation of soils, and thermal conductivity stuff about rocks.

You want a cooled detector.. doesn't have to be cryogenic, but below CO2 ice temp helps... wavelength is say 20 to 40 micrometers. CCD cameras work out to about 1.0 or 1.1 max micrometers. "Middle" infrared <definitions vary with discipline> covers reflected radiation from 1 micrometer to about 5 micrometers, where sunlit hot soils start to produce thermal emissions in the afternoon. Beyond 5 micrometers, solar illumination drops more and more and thermal emission takes over. 5 to 15 micrometers work in the daytime, but at night and in winter, you need wavelengths longwards of 15 micrometers to get enough thermal emission to spit at. (15 micrometers is the big atmosphere CO2 opacity band.. Rovers use it to measure atmosphere thermal structure from beneath, orbiters do from above.)

A 1-day time lapse image from a thermal IR camera would really tell you a lot about physical properties of rocks and soils we just can't get much of from MiniTES with it's limited sampling at any station during day and night and it's essentially non-imaging resolution. The maps it can make are wonderful scientifically,but they're spectral maps, not images except in the crudest sense.

Oh, Well...