During the Viking and Pathfinder missions to Mars, significant amounts of dust accumulated on the spacecrafts. In Pathfinder's case, the dust obscured the solar panels on the lander and the rover degrading their output current. The material adherence experiment aboard the Pathfinder rover quantified the rate of decrease in short circuit current at 0.28% per day. This rate is unacceptably high for long duration missions. In response, NASA has developed the Dust Accumulation and Removal Technology (DART) experiment. DART has three instruments for characterizing dust settling out of the atmosphere and tests two methods to keep dust from settling on solar cells.


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    Title :

    Dust Characterization Experiment for Solar Cells Operating on Mars


    Contributors:
    P. Jenkins (author) / G. A. Landis (author) / M. Krasowski (author) / L. Greer (author) / D. Wilt (author)

    Publication date :

    2001


    Size :

    4 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




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