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NASA’s Rover Captures the Sounds of Mars

With a microphone, the Perseverance rover has recorded the first ever sounds from Mars audible to the human ear. The findings demonstrate that recording robots could someday improve our understanding of planetary atmospheres.

“It’s a new sense of investigation we’ve never used before on Mars,” said Sylvestre Maurice  , an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study. “I expect many discoveries to come, using the atmosphere as a source of sound and the medium of propagation.”

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 Puff, Whir, Zap: Sounds from Mars Perseverance, one of NASA's rovers on Mars, recently captured a new sound recording. Listen closely and you can hear the pings and puffs of Perseverance's Gaseous Dust Removal Tool as it blows shavings off rock faces that the rover is examining. Also audible: a light Martian wind in the background. The new recording, from a microphone mounted on the chassis of the rover,

    00:00:34 adds to a growing 'playlist' of Mars sounds from Perseverance. The microphone on the SuperCam instrument has also picked up the whirring of the twin rotors on the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter SuperCam's laser, which vaporizes rock surfaces from a distance to study their composition, makes sparks and a high-pitched crackle when it strikes a rock. A team of scientists used Perseverance's sound recordings to make the first analysis of acoustics on Mars.

    00:01:10 Sound doesn't carry as far because of the thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere and for the most part, a deep silence prevails on the red planet. NASA