Built Tonka Tough!

One possibility was that a mechanical or electronics failure would kill the rovers before the solar panels ever got blocked out. Guess the simplest answer was the right answer.

why would you want a rover without windscreen wipers? - no, thanks! I think I will buy a Range Rover instead - polluting and everything, no fancy "green" solar panels for me

was only planned to be a 90 day mission. so yes 4 years is extremely impressive.

maybe the professor can have gilligan do something about that.

All I know is that R2D2 would have had a little arm with a brush pop out of his side to clean that stuff off.

Fake; Photoshoped.

It's a bit sad how excited I am about the upcoming bathtub post.

So the NASA engineers thought of every single other detail except one of the most important ones? When they were testing one in a desert they probably didn't get a sand storm so they forgot that stuff might cover the thing.

@gamecrazychris: Totally! How could those idiots at NASA overlook a problem that would cripple their vehicle after only four years of service.

Yet more proof that they could never have put a man on the moon!!

@gamecrazychris and @The Lab: See @xanderjanz. Everything past the 90 day mission for which the Spirit was designed is a bonus.

@gamecrazychris:
On the Sojourner mission they had a special sensor that would read the light through the dust to estimate how thick it was building up, so I'm pretty sure they are somewhat aware of the conditions on this mission too.

As stated earlier, four years into a 90 day mission is a very very odd place to accuse anyone of not taking stuff into account.
Laughable really.

Of course things like accumulating dust are also part of what we send probes there to discover, so one could dispassionately consider this also to be very useful data and a good thing in the big picture.

I recon that someone at NASA really doesn't like Blur, and is just keeping Spirit on Mars to piss off Alex James and the rest of the Beagle team.

@Candyman: Yeah. Dusty people can't put flags in the ground. Everyone knows that.

On top of that, the next generations of rovers will be built to take this in to account. These little guys are our current best example of pulling a Scotty.

@strider_mt2k:

I'm pretty sure @The Lab was joking about "those idiots at NASA."

@Biggy: Everything is fake to you backwards idiots.

If we're lucky they two rovers will at least last until the new rover sets down. Still, I say we let them continue on their mission and live out their life span instead of being shut-off. As to accusing NASA for a design flaw, that's silly. The rovers were designed with 90 days in mind, no more and no less. They weren't designed to last for years on end. So yeah, like someone else said that's all just a bonus.

A lot of you have commented about putting windscreen wipers. The guys did think of putting them on but the weight and the power requirement have to be factored in as well. Remember these machines were only designed for 90 days only and to put windscreen wipers means more weight, which means more rocket thrust and not to mention the extra drain on the electrical system which means bigger solar panels which means more weight which means more sturdy frame which again means more weight and so on.... So think before saying "how could they they forgot...."

I love that we can send a Honda to Mars, but we forget to put windshield wipers on the thing.

Doh!

Should have used Rain-X. Works with dust too.

@Biggy: you're fake. ha ha. wait...

Just wondering ..... why were the rovers designed for a 90 day mission? I mean NASA isn't exactly overwhelmed with cash to burn??

These things run on solar power, they're made of sturdy stuff ... why a 90 day life expectancy? Do we like littering other planets so much? I mean if i'm sending something where 'no man has ever been', i'd kind of take a longer term approach. Its not like there was a lack of things to explore on mars?

While I commend NASA engineering on their ability to make the rovers last this long past their expected lifespan ... i must question the intelligence of planning for a 90 day mission in the first place.

@Biggy: Sniffing glue again?

@kpuri: Seriously, remember you're dealing with a government agency, bound by a magical incantation of introverted funding and twisted levels of bureaucracy that have rarely been seen outside of defunct Eastern Bloc countries.

Congress can't, in their own narrow minded, but often well meaning minds, just write the JPL mars rover teams a blank check. They had to have a "representational" ending point of 90 days for the missions. By luck and fine engineering, both rovers have lived far beyond what anyone expected. Just thank what ever deity you jive with that they were given the money to keep them going.

Hello NASA. Might I interest you on a can of Air Duster?

@gamecrazychris: @The Lab: It was a deliberate decision. The mission was only expected to run for 90 days (at best) It was determined that weight of the armature needed to wipe off dust was neither necessary nor weight efficient. As every mg of weight was counted, adding weight in one area meant loosing weight in another. Compressors with blowers and arms were considered.

If I am not mistaken the next rover (MSL) doesn't have a dust abatement system either. They opted for more efficient panels.

It was covered in a press conference before the two rovers were even in orbit. I am looking for the NASA transcripts, but I remember listing to it.

Crap, that reminds me, I gotta clean my solar panels, it's been a few months.

I'd like to see a big robotic atomic powered Hummer cruising the Martian landscape. Big enough to handle some sand dunes and rocks, also able to haul/retrieve rock & soil samples for return to Earth.

olumpus has a dslr that can shed dust particles off its sensors. a crude unit could have been placed by the genius of NASA to the rovers panels to aid dislodging the dust particles.

but i guess the bean counters could not spare a couple of mobile phone motors to the project.

Not only is the chop job on the alleged [MARS ROVER] incomplete, but the added "grain" all over the picture is a dead giveaway of somebody trying to cover their P-Chopping tracks (I do it all the time).

(i just copied that gem from here : [gizmodo.com] ... i thought it was hilarious there. and needed a second chance to show its inanity to the world.)

What you snarky twerps are conveniently forgetting is that all NASA interplanetary projects are assigned end dates because they're given budgets. End of assigned $$=end of mission.

There are still spacecraft launched in the 1960s & 70s that will respond to signals...when we bother to query them.

@DeadWriter: The MSL wont have solar panels last I checked. There was some question on what the power source would be, but it looks like they're going with the more expensive RTG. Which is at least part of the reason the next one is going to cost so much more.

Still, when you compare the MSL to a manned trip to Mars. Its perfectly reasonable, I mean the MSL could potentially last for years and years on end (Think Voyager 1 & 2 which have been operating for around 30 years). Anyway, a manned trip to Mars would at least cost 300 billion dollars if not more and that's just for spending at best a week on Mars (probably less. Which means the majority of the time your just in space longer than any human being ever subjected to all sorts of radiation and watch out for the solar flares).

There's enough atmosphere on Mars they should have put an itty bitty compressor to have air to blow across them. Sure, it'd use a lot of power, but only rarely - you just don't go anywhere for a few days.

I've been pondering this problem for a while, and I figure if they could find a slight slope, tilt the rovers a bit to increase the angle on the panels using the active suspension on the thing, then give it a program to rapidly cycle the drive motors to create vibration, this could fix the issue.

But NASA is full of smart folks, I'm sure someone there has thought of this.

If people performed to the standard that the Mars rovers have so far, we'd live about 1200 years instead of 75.

And most people would still be useless wastes of natural resources, but for much, much longer.