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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It’s extra weight and complexity, and you don’t know ahead of time that this is what’s going to finally end the mission. There are a thousand other possible failure modes that you could dedicate additional resources to mitigating. Everything is a tradeoff.
Your solution can also introduce new failure modes that might be worse than the original one, maybe a piece of rock gets stuck on your windshield wiper and gouges into the solar panel, breaking it. Maybe the vibration system causes fatigue failure of an electrical connection.
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