From the wind to the wheels moving on sand and rocks: here are all the sounds of Mars collected by the microphones of the Perseverance rover in a NASA video.
They are much fainter and less harmonious sounds than those we hear on Earth but the analysis of these recordings has allowed us to better understand the characteristics of the thin Martian atmosphere.
The large NASA laboratory rover, about the size of an SUV, arrived on the surface of the red planet in July 2020.It has two simple commercial microphones on board, one installed on the body of the rover and the second on the end of the robotic arm, which made it possible to record a great variety of Martian sounds for the first time. "It's like really being there," said Baptiste Chide, a scientist at the French Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology who analyzes the sounds recorded by the rover. “Martian sounds - he added - have strong bass vibrations, so when you wear headphones, you can really hear them well. I believe that microphones will be an important resource for the future of the study of Mars and for many objects in the Solar System in general. "
The two microphones, which can also be purchased online, recorded a wide variety of sounds such as the wind, the movement of the rover (very metallic as the wheels are made of a metal alloy) or the 'zaps' of the laser used to vaporize the surface layers of the rocks.
Some of these recordings, such as the sound produced by the propellers of the Ingenuity drone during its fourth affected flight on April 30, have greatly improved knowledge on the propagation of waves in the Martian atmosphere.
"Studying the sound of Mars has taken us much further than we thought - said Nina Lanza, of the Los Alamos National Laboratories and who works on the data collected by Perseverance microphones - shows us how important it is to do science in the field."
