It is the “seven minutes of horror.” As the 2,300-pound, six-wheeled Nuclear Power Stabilization roller approaches Mars on Thursday, a supersonic parachute will slow down the rescue vehicle to 200 mph. About 70 feet above the landing site, astronauts set it back in a hover, then a “sky mast” reduces NASA’s latest rocker to the rust-colored dirt. low. As permanence rubs, the lifeboat will make itself clear and land will come nearby.
Don’t worry, it’ll be fine: perseverance, which studies martian geology and finds evidence of ancient microbial life there, uses landing strategies, much from the 2012 Intelligence mission. which is new, however, will be capable of earthlings hear much of the seven-minute drama. Nestled on the rover is a small microphone that, if all goes well, will record the sounds of the descent and, later, the martian environment itself, something that the Mars probe has not yet accomplished.
Given the prevalence of hypersensitive hardware that humans have been shooting at planets for the past 60-plus years, it’s amazing that we were never able to listen in. Yes, efforts were made: In the early 1980s, two Soviet Venera studies made Venus have microphones to estimate wind speed. But the recordings were static and unconventional. NASA’s 1999 Polar Lander mission included a mic, but the probe fell to pieces when it arrived. NASA tried again in 2008 with the Phoenix Mars mission, but the mic was nixed before being removed. Space agencies have thousands of images of planetary studies but little in the way of alien sounds.
So if today’s equipment could catch the wind ash and staccato sandblasting dust that comes with a video of the descent and landing and, yes, the clicks and whirrs of a robotic probe while it crawls over the sandy surface of Jezero Crater ‘s day and day out (okay, sol in and sol out) – wouldn’t you like to hear that?
Jason Mezilis, a Los Angeles-based rock musician, is certainly a lifelong composer and music enthusiast. In 2016, he was drinking drinks on a diner patio with his friend Joseph Carsten, who worked in robots at the nearby NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They were talking about the Curiosity rover’s impressive strategy, and Mezilis knew what it would look like. Would it be possible to set up a microphone on the upcoming Perseverance platform to capture the audio drama to accompany NASA video feeds? “How cool would that be?” He mused.
When Mezilis went ahead with this question, he went to a rendezvous with NASA. It’s a story that reminds us that innovation can come from amazing places.
Mezilis, young The 46-year-old with a messy mop-top, was something of a late bloom as a musician. He didn’t take up guitar just before his high school year, which caused his grades to drop and his focus to shift. As a result, he entered a piano lab – unprepared and nervous – for the music school at UCLA, and UC San Diego stopped accepting his program. He made his way to De Anza College in Cupertino, his hometown, where a teacher taught him theory – performance, harmonic structure, musical analysis. This was apparently the framework he needed. Teacher Mezilis helped prepare for the school placement exams, so when he applied to the UC Berkeley music department, he got into it happily. By the time he graduated, he was proficient in guitar, bass, and piano, along with other keyboard instruments.
A few years after college, Mezilis, who uses the stage name Jason Achilles, went to Los Angeles, and over the next few years he played in rock bands – Black Belt Karate, Your Horrible Smile, Owl – and did recording and production work. He owns his own studio in the sprawling Downtown Rehearsal warehouse, where he recorded his first album, Come down. He has since collaborated with the Hungarian and Czechoslovak symphony orchestra to record his writings, and is now helping Dizzy Reed’s Guns N ’Roses keyboard to produce his next album. In other words, it has had a clear and diverse career, but it is not rocket science, at least not the kind that JPL is looking for.