Here are Sounds from Mars Captured by Perseverance Rover

Thanks to two microphones aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, the mission has recorded nearly five hours of Martian wind gusts, rover wheels crunching over gravel, and motors whirring as the spacecraft moves its arm. These sounds allow scientists and engineers to experience the Red Planet in new ways – and everyone is invited to listen in. “It’s like you’re really standing there,” said Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist who studies data from the microphones at L’Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in France. “Martian sounds have strong bass vibrations, so when you put on headphones, you can really feel it. I think microphones will be an important asset to future Mars and solar system science.” Perseverance is the first spacecraft to record the sound of the Red Planet using dedicated microphones – both of which were commercially available, off-the-shelf devices. One rides on the side of the rover’s chassis. The second mic sits on Perseverance’s mast as a complement to the SuperCam laser instrument’s investigations of rocks and the atmosphere.

The body mic was provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, while the SuperCam instrument and its microphone were provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. SuperCam studies rocks and soil by zapping them with a laser, then analyzing the resulting vapor with a camera. Because the laser pulses up to hundreds of times per target, opportunities to capture the sound of those zaps quickly add up: the microphone has already recorded more than 25,000 laser shots. Some of those recordings are teaching scientists about changes in the planet’s atmosphere. After all, sound travels through vibrations in the air. From its perch on Perseverance’s mast, the SuperCam mic is ideally located for monitoring “microturbulence” – minute shifts in the air – and complements the rover’s dedicated wind sensors, which are part of a suite of atmospheric tools called MEDA, short for the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer. MEDA’s sensors sample the wind’s speed, pressure, and temperature one to two times per second for up to two hours at a time. SuperCam’s microphone, on the other hand, can provide similar information at a rate of 20,000 times per second over several minutes.



Credits:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/hear-sounds-from-mars-captured-by-nasa-s-perseverance-rover