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Comment by superjan | Hacker News Reader

One issue that plagued the mars rovers so far is the buildup of dust on the solar panels. Could the helicopter help by flying over the rover, thus blowing away the dust?

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Nope. They're not risking Ingenuity (a tech demo that works very well) crashing into Perseverance. Also: no need, Perseverance doesn't have solar panels but an Radioactive Thermal Generator.

Also, the dust is static

The dust can also be magnetic. Ingenuity has a color calibration plate [1] on top and it's protected from dust by a ring of magnets. Here [2] it is in situ on sol 2 on Mars. Clearly visible are the magnetic patterns made by the layer of dust that was kicked up at landing.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25433/mastcam-zs-calibration...

[2] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZLF_000...

Ok sorry for the noob question. I guessed no, just because of the risks, but now I see there is no point trying.

Perseverance (the rover) has its own "Gaseous Dust Removal Tool (GDRT)" that puffs compressed nitrogen to remove dust from samples before analyzing them, not sure if it can turn that back around on its own panels though...

Perseverance does not use solar power. Instead it has a generator using the slow decay of radioactive material. The solar panel problem was more with earlier rovers

Well, that's convenient.

It looks like maybe Ingenuity's panel could use a little blast of nitrogen though:

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_f...

I unsarcastically love the super-serious names military/space folks come up with for mundane things like a dust blower

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