A major component of any piece of NASA exploration equipment is the power plant and charging system. The Mars Rover like any other rover design has had issues with solar panels getting dirty and low battery levels. At one point it had to wait to charge and was having issues due to Marian fine sand covering the solar cells. Then suddenly it started working again. Why? Well some believe a dust devil came along and cleaned it? Whatever the real reason it is now running again fine and has outlasted all expectations of tenure on its mission.



We need better ways to conserve energy, better batteries and more efficient motors. That is the quest to refine these tele-robotic systems to do more with less. We must conserve energy for drilling into rocks, using robotic arms to collect samples, mobility of rover, communication, video cameras, computer processors and of course lighting. If we can delete some of these power hungry systems, we can provide our exploratory vehicles with advantages, which will be needed in future rovers.

The rovers we will be sending to moons or other planets will be cruising on the surface and motor over bumps. I propose we use these bumps to up the lights using electromagnetic induction technology, which will charge a capacitor instead of the headlights working off a battery. Currently there are some nifty micro-flashlights being used which you can buy which use a similar technique and are available thanks to the Everlite Flashlight technology research lab. These smaller flashlights work by shaking them for about thirty seconds and shine for about 6 minutes and they shine quite bright since they use a very bright LED light. Here is a link to this home use flashlight:

http://demo.physics.uiuc.edu/LectDemo/scripts/demo_descript.idc?DemoID=1138

Here is a quick movie you can watch online to see how this technology works.

http://www.modernoutpost.com/gear/movies/ee_forever.MPG

If these rover lights grow dim from too smooth of a surface or perfectly paved roads, yah, we wish, we don't even have those on Earth, then the system would revert back to the battery. Perhaps this is a good way to save the battery juice? Think on this.

"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance