What does Mars look like? The Perseverance Rover is going to find out

From the moment the rover bends down, its microphones record sound.

From the moment the rover crouches down, its microphones recording sound.
Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Nothing on the hills seems alive, so the rocky terrain of Mars will be filled with sounds of loneliness when NASA ‘s Perseverance rover lands in Jezero Crater next month. One of the rover’s tasks will be to listen to the Martian environment with microphones – the first attempt at acoustic data collection made by any spacecraft on Mars.

Perseverance is scheduled to land in Jezero Crater on 18 February and there will be two microphones. One is attached to the rover’s frame, just above one of its six wheels, and the other explodes from the rover’s SuperCam front, the optical element that gives much of the 7 to the rover. feet tall. SuperCam looks a bit like one-eyed WALL-E, with fresh paint work, a balanced lens, and a pair of keen ears, even if no one is around to listen to it.

The microphones are connected to Mars “Off-the-shelf jointts and landing. ”

Chide said the mic attached to the body – tucked into a mesh to protect it from Martian dust – will record the scratchy noises of entering Mars’ atmosphere and comes to the surface, while the sons of the SuperCam record the sounds of a Martian quotian life, as Perseverance goes around a crack and vaporizing rocks and rolling around his lying site, where he will be for the first two years on the Red Planet.

An artist’s view of perseverance studying the chemistry of Martian rock.

Artist’s impression of Sustainability studying the chemistry of Martian rock.
Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech (Fair Dealing)

Mars exhibits a unique acoustic environment for experimental, experimental, 1-2-3, due to the atmospheric pressure of the planet, the content of that atmosphere, and its temperature, and they are all very different from the position of the planet. this on Earth. (This goes for any of our planet neighbors, each is a unique riff on the unstable death cover). Air Mars, frigid, a heavy atmosphere of carbon dioxide about 1% as dense as that of the Earth Chide is a soundtrack compared to hearing all the sounds through a wall. As Katherine Wu described it well in a blog post for Harvard University:

The atmosphere Mars isn’t particularly friendly… This mix is ​​the other side of the hot, thick air on Venus, and we’d have voices lowest pitch due to the freezing temperature and the huskier from the slowest sound distance … that is, if we heard them at all. On Mars, sound would travel at a lower speed through much more visible gas. You could be standing thirty feet from a shaking and hearing banshee next to anything.

If you have the next thing-there was a door neighbor hitting EDM, you would feel the bass a lot more than other frequencies, which would have trouble going through wall sound barrier. The same could be said for sound on Mars. The Red Planet was set on fire, Chide said, it would have a lower pitch, and the sound would take longer to reach your ear. “We’re not going to have fireworks on Mars, we hope,” he said.

Of course, all this sounds conversation assumes successful landing on Mars. will be a lonesome long journey through a mostly quiet place that ends with a short, tribal touchdown. Even once it is safely deposited on the ground, the rover has to travel on unmeasured Martian land. Mar the infamous InSight mole recently proven, you never know what might go wrong on Mars.

If everything should go smoothly, the audio data will be restored le Give us perseverance first listen planet landscape. We hope they get a clear recording of one of the most memorable moments: an the first helicopter flight on another planet.

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