During its more than 15 months of operation on Mars, the rover Perseverancefrom NASA, has recorded several environmental sounds from the planet. The team responsible for the equipment selected some of these recordings and put together a “Martian playlist” lasting five hours.
Some excerpts can be heard in this linkwhich brings a small but sufficient sample of the local soundtrack.
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It can be noted that Mars is a very silent planet. In fact, the few natural Martian noises like wind are about 20 decibels quieter than the same noises on Earth. Terra.
“It’s so quiet that at some point we thought the mic was broken!” said Baptiste Chide, a postdoctoral scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is working with the recordings and presented the research results at the 182nd meeting of the Acoustic Society of America in Denver, capital of the US state of Colorado, on Wednesday. (25).
Despite limited audible material to work with, scientists are making several discoveries. They determined, for example, that the Martian wind has extreme variability, changing abruptly from a gentle breeze to violent gusts.
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Using timed laser sparks emitted by the rover, the team studied sound scattering on Mars, confirming that high-pitched sounds travel faster than low-pitched ones — something extremely unusual.
“Mars is the only place in the solar system where this happens in audible bandwidth because of the unique properties of the carbon dioxide molecule that makes up the atmosphere,” said Chide.
According to the researchers, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars also plays a role in the seasonality of sound. As the molecule freezes at the Martian poles during winter, the atmosphere becomes less dense, so the sound volume varies by about 20% between Martian seasons.
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