These sounds are truly different.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover recorded 60 seconds of Mars sound on Saturday (February 20), just two days later beautiful touch inside the Jezero crater. The newly released file, which contains mechanical rumble of the stray beam and the rustling of a breeze from the Red Planet, is the first true sound ever captured on the surface of a planet other than Earth.
“Really neat – overwhelming, if you will,” Dave Gruel, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, told a news conference on Monday (February 22). The sound was also revealed during the briefing charming video Perseverance captured during his entry, descent and landing (18 February).
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Gruel is in charge of Perseverance’s EDL camera system, which built a commercial microphone from the Danish company DPA Microphones. The instrument was supposed to capture sound while touching the seven “seven minutes of terror”, but did not, for reasons that Gruel and his colleagues are investigating. The microphone came to life quickly enough, but the historic soundtrack was recorded on Saturday.
Perseverance, the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, also carries a second microphone – one built into its rocky SuperCam instrument.
SuperCam is not up and running yet; the team is still conducting health research on Perseverance’s instruments and subsystems. Once SuperCam is online, the microphone will help the mission team to characterize target rocks, to reveal how hard they are and whether they have a thin layer. The microphone can also pick up a variety of other sounds, such as Martian breezes and the creaking of dirt under Perseverance’s wheels.
Perseverance may at some point record stereo sound by using the EDL and SuperCam microphones in concert. However, there are no guarantees; the EDL microphone is not suitable for use on the hard, icy Mars surface, so it is unclear how long it will last, Gruel told Space.com last week.
Mars 2020 is an ambitious mission that will advance the exploration of Red Planet in different ways, if all goes according to plan. Perseverance, for example, will hunt for signs of ancient Martian life on the floor of Jezero, which offered a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. The rover will also collect dozens of monsters and store them in the closet, which will bring a joint NASA European Space Agency campaign back to Earth, perhaps already in 2031.
The mission also offers several technological demonstrations. The one, a tool called MOXIE (“Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), is designed to generate oxygen from the thin, atmosphere dominated by Mars with carbon dioxide. Another is the Mars Helicopter Reason, which aims to become the first rotorcraft ever to fly on a world beyond the earth.
Ingenuity’s test campaign will be the first major activity undertaken by the mission team after their perseverance. The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) helicopter flights are expected to take place this spring, and one or both microphones could make history.
High frequency sounds attenuate very quickly in Mars’ atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as the earth. But the microphones may pick up a low rotor wash, members of the mission team told Space.com.
Such sound has more value than the scientific insights it offers, and will help bring the Red Planet closer to us all, Gruel said.
During Monday’s news conference, he tells a story about a conversation he had a few years ago while touring JPL. One of the tour participants was particularly excited about Perseverance’s planned microphones. Gruel asked why, and she replied that her sister was visually impaired and therefore could not get the same enjoyment and inspiration from Mars Rover photos that most of us take for granted.
“And it stuck with me,” Gruel said.
“I wish I had actually captured that person’s name,” he added. “I would like to send it to her now and say, ‘We did it. I hope your sister enjoys it.'”
While the newly released recording features the first true Mars sound, it is not the first sound of any kind captured on the Red Planet. NASA’s InSight Lander the Martian wind ‘heard’ shortly after the touch in November 2018, after processing data collected by an air pressure sensor and a seismometer.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.