After 14 years, the Mars rover Opportunity is still roving about and taking measurements on the Martian surface, due to these mysterious, recurring “cleaning events,” which have wiped the rover’s heavily-encrusted solar panels completely clean, enabling it to receive solar power and to continue doing its tasks.
The Opportunity is designed to power down during the night and it is during these periods, while it is not recording anything that something (or someone) has been conducting these deep cleaning events, as evidenced by the rover’s own cameras, which have several times photographed from one day to the next, the solar arrays change from completely covered in red dust to sparkling clean. These cleaning events have been attributed to wind but given the encrusted state of the panels and the apparent “power washes” they receive, this just doesn’t seem possible to me.
Ironically, the notorious hacker Gary McKinnon, who allegedly hacked NASA’s databases and discovered crew lists for off-planetary missions called “Solar Warden” is seen on the YouTube comment thread of this video, defending the wind hypothesis, saying, “…the atmosphere is thinner and the gravity is far less so dust blows off easily.”
