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A windshield wiper for Mars dust is developed


Waspie_Dwarf

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A windshield wiper for Mars dust is developed

A team of researchers at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) has developed a device that works as a windshield wiper to eliminate Mars dust from the sensors on the NASA spacecrafts that travel to the red planet.

The actuator, a type of brush made up of Teflon fibers that are moved by materials that have shape memory, was designed to clean the ultraviolet sensors that were part of the North American space agency’s Curiosity mission, although, in the end, the device did not fly with the Martian rover. “In our laboratories, we demonstrated that it worked correctly in the extreme conditions that it would have to endure on Mars, with temperatures ranging between zero degrees and eighty below zero Celsius, and an atmospheric pressure one hundred times lower than that of the earth,” explains the head of the project at UC3M, Luis Enrique Moreno, a tenured professor in the Department of Systems and Automatics Engineering.

This device, whose technology will be used to carry out other space missions that are already under way, solves a problem presented by the atmosphere of Mars: the accumulation of iron dust on the flat surfaces of sensors. The Spanish firm Crisa, part of Astrium España, charged UC3M with developing this device, so that it could be built into the Curiosity mission’s meteorological station, REMS (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station), which was developed by a consortium of research centers under the direction of the Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC/INTA – Astrobiology Center). .

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