Listening to that week+ old teleconf - I heard that they intend to inspect the front edge of one of the solar arrays to try and identify the mechanism for array output increases ( i.e. the cleaning events ) - I guess that means an MI obs. of them - as someone touted previously - should be interesting

Opportunity is at 80% of it's orig. power - almost full caperbility ( 820Whr/sol
) . The spectrometers are getting a little tired - their sources are decaying obviously.

Spirit's getting 350-400 Whr's a sol. Eek. Poor thing

Doug

Obviously the gas stations at Gusev don't have car washes..l.

Is there anything they could actually do to try and reduce the amount of dust on Spirit's panels?

The solar panels unfolded after EDL. Is it possible to refold them into a vertical position and then "jiggle" the rover by rapidly driving back and forth, or turning side-to-side? If they could, it might loosen some of the dust on the panels.

Any other crazy ideas to clean those panels?

Actually, it's seemed to me that Spirit began to really see degradation when it was sitting pretty much idle, trying to troubleshoot that wheel problem at the bottom of the hills. My guess is that the best thing for keeping the panels clean is to keep moving and bouncing over rocks. Have the feeling this Martian dust doesn't cling to surfaces as long as there's a lot of wiggling around.

Just a theory though. We'll see how it goes if they really put some distance on Spirit each day.

The panels were originally locked down (by clamps I think) and the locks were blown with pyrotechnic charges way back when. The panels then automatically extended (via a tensioned line, I'm guessing). There is no way to move them anywhere anymore.

From what I've heard there were some suggestions to design in some mechanism to clean the panels, but the team decided the extra complexity wasn't worth it. Who would have thought the rovers would last this long? And at any rate, their power has gone up lately, so maybe the dust is being blown off rather than on.. who knows.

I wonder if a lot of the dust that collects on the panels is generated by the "ratting" process. It seems that neither rover has done much grinding lately. Perhaps the wind and/or the bouncing of rovers would normally be enough to keep the panels clean.
A dust guard might be a important addition to the next generation RAT.