China chooses landing site for its Tianwen-1 Mars rover

[Admin]

China has apparently chosen a primary landing site for its Tianwen-1 Mars rover ahead of the spacecraft's arrival at the Red Planet in February 2021.

China chooses landing site for its Tianwen-1 Mars rover : Read more

 

[newtons_laws]

Good luck to the Chinese Tianwen-1 Mars rover and hope it achieves a successful entry into the Martian atmosphere and surface landing, always a difficult task to achieve. I see that like several of NASA's previous rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity the Chinese one will be powered by solar cells, which of course are potentially vulnerable to losing power output due to Martian dust accumulating on the solar panels. Sometimes NASA's rovers had their solar panels fortuitously cleaned by passing dust devils, but I wonder whether consideration has ever been given to including a motorised wiper blade to clear dust from the solar panels?