Opportunity has blown off the dust from the Mars rover with the Martian "wind"

In general, if we were talking about the earthly structure, the title would look very strange. Well, dust blown away, and blown away, the big deal.

But for the Opportunity rover, this is incredible luck, literally a second life. The thing is that during the time of the rover on Mars, it was thickly covered by the Martian dust, which also covered the solar panels of the device. As a result, the rover began to receive a "living wage" of energy.
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And that means - reducing the possibility of maneuver, the number of scientific experiments. Now, the rover panels are cleaner than in any of the Martian winters since 2005, which means getting much more than before, the amount of energy. Dust from the rover blew away in March of this year, when there was a high activity of air masses on Mars. Perhaps the rover got into the zone of action of the "dust devil."


A dusty whirlwind on Mars , photographed by the Spirit rover. The counter in the lower left corner shows the time in seconds since the first frame. In the last frames it is clear that the vortex left its mark on the Martian surface. Also visible are three more whirlwinds in the background.

This means extending the life of the rover, more scientific programs, no need for the rover team to constantly save battery energy.

PS Previously, this has happened many times (thanks to kbtsiberkin ), but this time the cleaning came out very well. Here is another material on the topic from the same Wikipedia: “On March 12, 2005, a dusty vortex cleaned the Spirit rover solar panels, after which the level of energy received by the robot increased and it could do more work. A similar incident (cleaning of solar cells from accumulated dust) was previously observed with the Opportunity Mars rover, which is also associated with a dusty whirlwind. ”

Via nasa