This year, three Mars probes have arrived at Mars successively, among which the Hope Mars probe in the United Arab Emirates is an orbital probe whose main task is to fly around Mars, while the Tian Wen No.1 Mars probe in China and the Perseverance Mars probe in the United States are both equipped with rovers in order to land on Mars and send them to the surface of Mars for scientific research. Among them, the Spirit rover has successfully landed on Mars, and our Tian Wen 1 is currently flying around Mars. It is expected to land in May-June this year and send the rover Zhu Rong to the surface of Mars. As the first rover named Perseverance, its energy source is nuclear energy, while our Zhu Rong rover uses solar energy. As we all know, the advantages of nuclear power are obvious. Why does our Zhu Rong rover use solar energy instead of nuclear batteries?
Compared with solar panels, nuclear batteries can continuously generate energy without illumination, with good stability and long working time. It would certainly be better if they could be equipped with nuclear batteries as power. However, although nuclear batteries have obvious advantages, they are not completely beneficial. The first is the problem of nuclear radiation, and the second is that the structure of nuclear battery is too complicated, its mass is greater, and its safety is not as good as that of solar panels. After all, solar energy is a very mature energy source.
Tian Wen-1 Mars probe is the first Mars exploration mission in China, and the Zhu Rong rover is also the first in China. In the first Mars exploration mission, it is a challenging task to complete the orbit, landing and patrol of Mars. It is too risky to use complex nuclear batteries directly, so it is reasonable to use mature solar panels on Zhu Rong Mars rover for safety reasons. After all, American rovers have only started using nuclear batteries in recent years. Perseverance, which is equipped with nuclear batteries, is also very expensive, one of which is that the cost is very high, and the cost of Perseverance rover reaches more than 2 billion US dollars.
Although human exploration of Mars has a long history, Mariner 4, the first successful Mars probe in the world, was launched in 1964 and successfully flew over Mars in 1965. The first Mars rover was launched on the surface of Mars at the end of last century. 1On July 4th, 997, Mars Pathfinder successfully landed on the surface of Mars, and sent the first rover Sogener to the surface of Mars. The energy of this rover mainly comes from the solar array, which can provide the maximum power of 16 watts for the rover. Later, both Spirit and Opportunity used similar solar panels. It was not until 20 1 1 year 1 1 month that Curiosity, the world's first nuclear-powered rover, was launched, and Tenacity, which landed on Mars this year, was the second nuclear-powered rover in human history. Obviously, the time for the rover to use nuclear power is not long, that is, in recent years.
Most importantly, solar panels provide energy for the rover, and can also meet the needs of the current rover to explore Mars. Although the famous rover Opportunity uses solar panels and its design life is only 90 days, it has been running on the surface of Mars for nearly 15 years and lost contact in 20 18 years. The rover Spirit, which arrived on Mars almost at the same time as Opportunity, also used solar panels. Its design life is only 90 days, but its running time is close to 7 years. It can be seen that the service life of the rover does not depend entirely on whether the rover uses solar panels or nuclear batteries.
But in general, there are still some restrictions on Mars powered by solar cells. For example, the distance between Mars and the sun is relatively long, and the sunlight is less. The weather on Mars itself is relatively bad, such as sandstorms, which may affect the power generation of solar panels. Therefore, the future trend of the rover should be that it will be better to carry nuclear batteries.