NASA scientists have reduced the audio recordings of Perseverance on the Martian surface to five years.hour playlist of the best hits from the red planet (thereyou can listen some here). Sounds are eerily quiet and to offer a new way to explore the Martian environment. They already have assistance confirm some theories about how sound travels around the planet.
Rover audio was first released last year—none of the sounds were very pleasing to the ear, possibly due to electromagnetic interference. The last sounds are softer than these cries; a analysis of sounds and what they can tell us about how the sound trip to Mars was published last month in Nature.
Baptiste Chide, planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Gizmodo in a video call last year that audio heard on Mars would sound like it was going through a wall, because the Martian atmosphere is 1% as dense as Earth. But Chide was still surprised at how quiet Mars was. “It’s so quiet that at one point we thought the microphone was broken,” Chide told An Acoustical Society of America. Release.
The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021 with a suite of technologies designed to find out if Mars ever hosted microbial life in its ancient past. But in addition to these scientific instruments, the rover also came with two microphones, made from off-the-shelf components, to record the first-ever audio data on Mars.
One of Perseverance’s microphones is attached to the rover’s frame and sits just above one of its wheels. This microphone is enclosed in mesh to protect it from Martian dust, which is kicked up by the planet’s winds and can be deadly to spacecraft, as the Opportunity rover so inadvertently learned. The other microphone is attached to the rover’s SuperCam, one of the machine’s main cameras that sits on an arm above the rover’s frame.
G/O Media may receive a commission
Save $70
Apple AirPods Max
Discover next-level sound
Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking delivers cinema-like sound that surrounds you
As a result, the researchers found that the latter microphone picked up sounds from the wind blowing around the rover, while the former microphone picked up more sounds from the rover’s activities. The microphones successfully picked up the whine of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight, even when the rotorcraft was over 300 feet.
In March, the Chide team used the SuperCam microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. The most recent research used both microphones to characterize the acoustic environment of Mars and used near and distant sound sources to show how the carbon dioxide-laden atmosphere affected the ability of sound to travel.
March is much colder than Earth, with a thinner atmosphere. NASA scientists expected sound to travel slower on Mars, and it did. The researchers found that high-frequency sounds also travel faster than low-frequency noises.
The sound on Mars will change throughout the planet’s 687-day year. During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide in the planet’s polar regions freezes, which will cause sounds to fluctuate in intensity, the statement said. So stay tuned. As long as Perseverance works as the name suggests, we should soon be getting a more diverse portfolio of Martian blends.
More: Here’s 16 Minutes of Perseverance Rover Going Kssst, Tiktik and Pffft