Quiet place? Rover Perseverance records the natural sounds of Mars

Recordings of the natural sounds of Mars, made by the Perseverance rover, were edited and put together by scientists, who used them to create a sort of “Martian playlist”. The material is five hours long, and the most surprising thing is that it shows how quiet Mars has environments, with natural sounds about 20 decibels lower than these same sounds on Earth.

O The Perseverance rover landed last year inside Jezero Crater, on Mars, next to the Ingenuity helicopter. Almost 18 months after arriving at their new home, Perseverance has already managed to accumulate several hours of recordings of Martian sounds, captured by their pair of microphones.

But the “sound of silence” on Mars — pardon the pun on the music The Sound of Silenceby the duo Simon & Garfunkel — surprised the researchers who worked with the recordings. “It’s so quiet there that at some point we thought the mic was broken,” said Baptiste Chide, one of the team members who has been reviewing the recordings. Even so, the team discovered some fascinating phenomena in the data.

After listening carefully, the team identified that the winds on Mars have great variability, causing the planet’s atmosphere to suddenly go from calm to intense conditions. Using the sounds of laser beams used to analyze rocks, the Perseverance rover team calculated the dispersion of the speed of sound, confirming the theory that high-frequency sounds travel through the Martian atmosphere faster than those of low frequencies.

Chide commented that, thanks to the properties of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere, Mars is the only planet in the Solar System where this phenomenon occurs in ranges within the range of human hearing. Furthermore, the authors suggest that as the compound is frozen at the poles of Mars during the Winter, the atmosphere becomes less dense. Therefore, the sound volume may vary approximately 20% between stations.

The paper describing the team’s findings was published in the journal Nature.

Source: Nature; Via: EurekAlert

–

–