The Perseverance rover captured the world’s creativeness when it recorded sounds from the floor of Mars shortly after its arrival on the pink planet in 2021. It recorded sounds of the Martian wind, in addition to the noises it made itself, and it even managed to seize the sounds of the Ingenuity helicopter in motion. Now, scientists have analyzed these recordings to find out about how sound propagates on Mars, and located that the velocity of sound isn’t fixed there — it will depend on the sound’s pitch.
One of many challenges of recording sounds on Mars is that as a result of the environment is so skinny there, scientists had been not sure if it was going to be attainable to report sounds in any respect. The environment is made up largely of carbon dioxide, which tends to soak up sound waves as nicely. So the truth that the microphones on Perseverance had been in a position to report Ingenuity from a distance of 80 meters was a shock and a delight.
However because of this the recordings which can be found are usually quiet. “Mars may be very quiet due to low atmospheric strain,” stated coauthor of the examine Baptiste Chide of Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico in a statement. “However the strain modifications with the seasons on Mars.” Meaning we will anticipate modifications to the sounds recorded in future. “We’re coming into a high-pressure season,” Chide stated. “Perhaps the acoustic surroundings on Mars shall be much less quiet than it was once we landed.”
The strangest discovering from the examine is that the velocity of sound on Mars is variable. Right here on Earth, the velocity of sound is 767 mph. However on Mars, the velocity sound travels at will depend on its pitch: Low-pitched sounds journey at about 537 mph, and higher-pitched sounds transfer significantly sooner at 559 mph. This appears to be because of the excessive nature of the skinny, chilly environment.
The recordings had been made utilizing Perseverance’s two microphones: One on its SuperCam instrument, used to listen to the sounds made when a laser strikes its rock goal to carry out spectroscopy, and a second which information the sounds of puffs of air from the Gaseous Mud Removing Software which clears rock surfaces of particles. The SuperCam microphone is the principle one getting used for the science work.
“The microphone is now used a number of instances a day and performs extraordinarily nicely; its total efficiency is best than what we had modeled and even examined in a Mars-like surroundings on Earth,” stated David Mimoun, professor at Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO) and lead of the crew that developed the microphone experiment. “We may even report the buzzing of the Mars helicopter at lengthy distance.”
The viability of researching sounds on Mars opens new avenues of analysis. “It’s a brand new sense of investigation we’ve by no means used earlier than on Mars,” stated Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist on the College of Toulouse in France and lead writer of the examine. “I anticipate many discoveries to return, utilizing the environment as a supply of sound and the medium of propagation.”
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