By Marcia Dunn -
The Associated Press
What does a dust devil on Mars sound like?
By chance, a
NASA
rover had its microphone turned on when a tower of red dust passed directly overhead, and it recorded the noise.
This is about 10 seconds in which not only thunderous gusts of wind of up to 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour are heard, but also the sound of hundreds of dust particles hitting the
Perseverance
rover .
Scientists released the first such audio on Tuesday.
According to the researchers, the sound is very similar to that of terrestrial dust eddies, although quieter, since the thin atmosphere of Mars produces muffled sounds and less strong winds.
According to Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of the study published in Nature Communications, last year the dust devil passed quickly over Perseverance, hence the short duration of the audio.
At the same time, the parked rover
's navigation camera was
capturing images, while its weather monitoring instrument was collecting data.
“Persy caught him red-handed,” says Germán Martínez, co-author of the study, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Photographed for decades on Mars but never heard of until now, dust devils are common on the red planet.
This one was average: at least 400 feet tall and 80 feet wide, traveling at 16 feet per second.
The microphone picked up 308 beeps of dust as it passed, explained Murdoch, who helped build it.
Since the
rover 's
SuperCam
's microphone
turns on for less than three minutes every few days, Murdoch said it was "certainly lucky" that the dust devil appeared when it did on September 27, 2021. He estimates there were only a one in 200 chance of picking up audio from the dust eddy.
Of the 84 minutes collected in his first year, "there is only one recording of the dust devil," he wrote in an email from France.
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This same microphone on Perseverance's mast provided the first sounds from Mars—namely, the Martian wind—shortly after the
rover
landed in February 2021. Driving of the rover and the flight of its accompanying helicopter were heard next. , the little Ingenuity, as well as the crackle of the vehicle's lasers, the main raison d'être of the microphone.
These recordings allow scientists to study the Martian wind, atmospheric turbulence and, now, the movement of dust like never before, according to Murdoch.
The results "demonstrate how valuable acoustic data can be in space exploration."
Hunting for rocks that may contain signs of ancient microbial life, Perseverance has so far collected 18 samples from Jezero Crater, once the site of a river delta.
NASA plans to return these samples to Earth within a decade.
The Ingenuity helicopter has made 36 flights, the longest of which lasted almost three minutes.