Why didn't Spirit have blades to clean the solar panels?

Question by MistWing: Why didn't Spirit have blades to clean the solar panels?
At one point, Spirit's solar panels were covered with dust which hindered their ability to rechage Spirit's batteries. It was only the fortunate passing of a dust devil that removed this dust. My question is, why didn't the designers design some kind of 'wiper blade' to remove the dust? Was there some 'design philosophy' reason, or did it just not occur to the designers?

Thanks


Best answer:
Answer by I don't think soTwo reasons. Spirit was only designed to last 90 days. Cleaning of the panels was not needed to meet this design criteria. The other reason is that every ounce of weight is counted on spacecraft. You can only carry so much mass to Mars. So in order to add a mechanism to clean the panels, you would have had to leave something else off. The science equipment was considered more important.

Later rovers will be nuclear powered, so they won't have this problem.

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