NASA’s Perseverance Rover began converting Mars rocks with lasers and recording the sound.
NASA recently released a 10-second audio clip of Perseverance’s lasers firing away on the red planet. As they hit Mars’ surface, a rhythmic clicking sound can be heard, like another world metronome.
A microphone attached to the Rover’s SuperCam laser instrument picked up sound from 30 laser impacts on March 12, some slightly louder than others. The staccato that appears on the recording is the sound of the laser vaporizing rocks.
The lasers were hitting a rock called ‘Máaz’ (meaning Mars in the Navajo language), which was located 10 meters from the Rover. By having the rover cut the surface of Mars in this way, scientists can learn more about how hard rocks like Maaz are and what they consist of.
“If we tap on a hard surface, we will not hear the same sound as when we shoot on a soft surface,” astronomer Naomi Murdoch, a member of the SuperCam team, told the BBC.
Máaz appears to be a basalt pride, made of magnesium and iron.
Sounds from another planet
These are not the first sounds that radiated perseverance to the earth.
A few days after the rover landed on Mars in February, it captured sounds of a Martian breeze. The clip was the first sound recording scientists ever collected from the surface of another planet.
Engineers equipped perseverance with two microphones. The Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) Cam microphone was primarily intended to record sounds from the landing, although it could not succeed, and to also collect sound from Perseverance’s journey through space. The robber launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in July and traveled nearly 300 million kilometers to reach Mars.
The other microphone, which is connected to the Rover’s SuperCam, is designed to listen to sounds from the Rover after it lands on the Martian surface.
According to Dave Gruel, NASA’s chief engineer for Perseverance’s camera and microphone systems, both microphones will continue to collect sound for the rest of the mission. The robot is ready to search the Jezero crater of Mars for the next two years for signs of ancient alien life and the collection of rock samples.
“We know the public is fascinated by the exploration of Mars, which is why we added the EDL Cam microphone to the vehicle because we hoped it could enhance the experience, especially for visually impaired space fans, and people around the world. involve and inspire, “he said in a NASA press release.
Perseverance is NASA’s fifth and most sophisticated Mars rover. The agency previously equipped two Mars spacecraft with microphones: the Mars Polar Lander and the Phoenix Lander. But the microphone on the former failed, and the latter never turned on his microphone.
NASA’s InSight lander, which touched Mars in 2018, has also enabled scientists to listen to the Martian wind, but in a different way. The lander is equipped with a seismometer to study Martian earthquakes, so that the instrument can also detect vibrations caused by wind as it blows over InSight’s solar panels.
The low sounds of these vibrations are audible to the human ear.
Morgan McFall-Johnsen contributed reporting to this story.
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