Our growing list of sounds is on March now includes lasers.
NASA’s Perseverance started using its SuperCam instrument on the Red Planet, members of the mission team announced today (March 10). SuperCam is equipped with a microphone that picks up the soft blast of the Martian wind, as well as the not-so-soft generated by the laser when it hits a rock target.
“These surveys showed that not only is our microphone functioning well, but that we also have a very high quality signal for our scientific studies,” said SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l ‘Espace in Toulouse, France, said during a live webcast today.
“In the SuperCam team, we are very excited about the perspectives and scientific investigations we are going to be able to do with the microphone data,” Murdoch said.
Related: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover mission to the Red Planet pictured
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The car’s diameter, the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, landed on the floor of the Jezero crater on February 18. The main tasks of the rover are to look for signs of ancient life in the 28-kilometer-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero, which housed a deep lake and a river delta billions of years ago, and to collect dozens of samples for future returns. to the earth.
SuperCam, which sits on Perseverance’s head-like mast, is one of the seven science tools with which the robber will do this work outside the world. SuperCam shoots a laser at targets up to 7 meters away, generating a cloud of vaporized rock, the composition of which can be determined by the cameras and spectrometers of the instrument.
As Murdoch and her colleagues announced today, such rock-climbing has already begun. On March 2, SuperCam fired at a target named Máaz, the Navajo word for Mars (perseverance investigates a part of Jezero that the team called Canyon de Chelly, to a national monument on Navajo land in the northeast of Arizona.)
The SuperCam observations enabled the team to determine that Máaz has a basaltic composition. Basalts are igneous, or volcanic, rocks that are common on Mars as well as on Earth. But it is unclear at this time whether Máaz itself is volcanic, said Roger Wiens, chief investigator of SuperCam, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy in New Mexico.
It is also possible that Máaz ” is a sedimentary rock made up of solidified grain that has been washed into the river Lake Jezero and cemented together ‘, Wiens said during today’s update.
The instrument recorded the SuperCam microphone from the Mars wind during Perseverance’s first few days on Mars. The microphone also captured the innumerable fast snaps of the Máaz work, emanating from shock waves generated by the heat and vibration of the rock evaporation.
Such a sound would be very useful for the SuperCam team, Murdoch said. For example, details of the snaps will reveal the hardness of each rock target, a detail that cannot be determined from the composition alone. (Chalk and marble have the same chemical composition, as Murdoch pointed out.)
SuperCam surveys will also help the Perseverance team track the rover and its various subsystems and better enable researchers to dominate the thin atmosphere of Mars by carbon dioxide, Murdoch said.
Perseverance wears another microphone also – one built into its EDL camera system (entry, descent and landing). The EDL microphone did not record any sound during the rover’s “seven minutes of terror” attack on February 18, but it did capture sound on the Mars surface.
These two microphones are the first to ever record true sound on Mars. And they can work together at some point; mission team members have the possibility of use both microphones at the same time to capture stereo sound on the Red Planet.
Perseverance has not yet begun his scientific work in earnest. The first major task for the Rover is to find a suitable aerodrome for the Rover’s helicopter, a £ 4 (1.8 kilogram) vessel. called ingenuity, to make its technological demonstration flights.
Perseverance will seek to document Ingenuity’s pursuit of the Mars heavens. And it could even be a multimedia extravaganza: it’s possible one or both photos could capture the sounds of Ingenuity’s rotors through the thin Mars sky, mission team members said.
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.