For me it seems strange that a 200Mlj Mars robot (like Insight,etc) meet the end of life becouse of dust on solar panels. Why they aren’t equiped with some kind of vibration mechanism or windshield wiper-similar thech to deal with a problem? This seems to me like WTF?
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Keep in mind that Mars is ridiculously far away and we don’t understand it very well yet. Even successfully landing on the planet is hard enough. Across all countries, approximately half of attempts to reach Mars over the years failed or crashed.
Spacecraft, rovers, and landers are complex and there are thousands of things that could go wrong. It doesn’t make sense to go to great lengths to avoid one bad outcome while neglecting others. Given a limited budget, compromises need to be made. So nothing is designed to last forever – rather, a mission length is decided, and everything is overengineered with the goal that even if everything goes wrong, it will last at least as long as the mission length.
In 2003/2004, the Mars Exploration Rovers landed (Spirit and Opportunity). The mission length was just 90 days, but if successful would be the longest mission on the surface of Mars to date. It was already ambitious. It was expected that the solar panels would accumulate dust and that eventually if nothing else failed, the solar panels would eventually be the problem.
The mission was a tremendous success beyond everyone’s wildest hopes. Everything worked as designed, and to everyone’s surprise, dust storms cleaned off the solar panels. Both rovers kept driving around for more than 10 years.
InSight also had a mission length and it met its objectives. There was hope that it would last longer, thanks to those dust storms – but it turned out that the location where it landed didn’t get enough dust storms to clean off the panels.
That was a surprise. Now we know.
The next mission will probably take that into account. But still, within reason – the goal is never to last forever, just to find that right balance of minimizing the chances any one failure ends the mission too early.
InSight was NOT a failure. It wasn’t designed to last forever.
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