As the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, the Ingenuity Helicopter, and the InSight Lander have been on Mars for over 3 months, more and more dust had been accumulated on the InSight lander’s solar panels. The dust has negative effects on power conservation and it resulted in the InSight lander losing about 30 watt-our energy daily on Mars.
We are building a 1:2 Peseverance Mars Rover Replica, which will perfectly replicate the appearance structure of the real Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover in very fine details, but with no scientific functions. Building the InSight lander is also under our consideration. It can be a nice decoration closet for the Perseverance Mars Rover Replica.
The team came up with an innovative and counterintuitive way to remove the dust. Instead of installing another motor or utilize Ingenuity Helicopter’s blazes, in which both methods require too much power than we want to, to shake off the dust, a small scoop is used to trickle sands near the solar panel, and then the large sand grains will carry the small dust away when the wind blows. That is to say, when to scoop sand also needs to be carefully planned. After the dust’s removal, it has been decided that the InSight lander will go dormant later this Summer to save energy until August.
It can be speculated that dust could also accumulate on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and the Ingenuity Helicopter, but since they move more than the InSight lander, the dust so far is not an yet. For our Perseverance Mars Rover Replica, if you drive it outside, dust is not an expected problem since the battery will be inside the body.
Around October 7th, Mars and Earth will rotate to the opposite sides of the Sun, and this will have significant effects on the communications between the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and Earth. So during that period, even though the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will keep on recording data and send the data back to Earth, Earth will not give any commands to the rover. Essentially, most of the operation will pause till the end of October.
For our Perseverance Mars Rover Replica, you won’t need to worry about downtime, since it will be operating on batteries or outlets. If you are interested in our Mars Rover Replica, please check [1:2 Perseverance Mars Rover Replica Design and Building Diary].