2 ms·

I would suspect that the problem is more difficult than you make it out to be. First, Mars is very windy/dusty. Second, there is no water so brushing dust is ha

I would suspect that the problem is more difficult than you make it out to be. First, Mars is very windy/dusty. Second, there is no water so brushing dust is harder than on earth. Add in the increased static cling and dust ingress into the motors and it is not clear to me that brushing is actually viable on mars without a lot of extra engineering (and teams to figure all this out). I’m sure this decision was made with a good e evaluation since they did make the choice to add more panels which has its own downsides. There might even be some interesting papers out ther.

m4rtink 4y ago
What about compressing some of the atmosphere and then releasing it repeatedly from close proximity over the dusty panels? Given the very low atmosphereric pressure on Mars, a bit of gas at terrestrial sea level pressure equivalent would do wonders. As for downsides - you need a compressor and some filtering to avoid clogging your gas system with dust (thats likely the main obstacle). Still doable IMHO and I'm sure followup probes and eventually settlements will find how to handle Martian dust efficiently.