NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Wednesday released two historical sound recordings of the surface of Mars.
In the first audio clip, recorded with the two microphones of the Perseverance Mars rover, listeners can hear wind.
In their message on SoundCloud, NASA described the sound as “listening to a sea shell or holding a hand over the ear.”
They acquired the sound from the instrument on February 19, about 18 hours after landing on the planet’s Jezero crater.
“The mast holding the microphone was still stored on Perseverance’s deck, so the sound was muted,” they explained.
In the second track, listeners can hear laser impact on a rock target in sound taken on March 2nd.
‘The sounds of 30 impacts are heard, some slightly louder than others. Variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information about the physical structure of the targets, such as their relative hardness or the presence of weathering covers, ”NASA wrote in a caption. “The target, Máaz (‘Mars’ in Navajo), was about 3.1 meters away.’
Both recordings were taken with the Rover’s SuperCam, an instrument that evaporates on the rock and is mounted on the ‘head’ of the Rover mast, which can help scientists hunt for fossils on the red planet.
In the cut with an audible wind, the mast on which the microphone sits was still raised, muffling the sound, which the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPERAO) researcher and planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch said during a discussed joint news. conference Wednesday with Center National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and NASA.
‘First, on the surface of Mars, we have a very low atmospheric pressure. It is actually 150 times lower than on Earth. On top of that, the atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide, ”Murdoch explained. “And these two factors together mean that sound does not propagate on the surface of Mars in the same way as on Earth.”
“For this reason, the SuperCam microphone is particularly sensitive. “And this enables us to record sounds despite the strong attenuation in the Martian atmosphere,” she said.
The Mars 2020 rover is the third time the microphone has been sent to Mars.