The Perseverance rover captured the world’s creativeness when it recorded sounds from the floor of Mars shortly after its arrival on the purple 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 study how sound propagates on Mars, and located that the velocity of sound isn’t fixed there — it is determined by the sound’s pitch.
One of many challenges of recording sounds on Mars is that as a result of the ambiance is so skinny there, scientists have been uncertain if it was going to be doable to file sounds in any respect. The ambiance is made up largely of carbon dioxide, which tends to soak up sound waves as properly. So the truth that the microphones on Perseverance have been in a position to file Ingenuity from a distance of 80 meters was a shock and a delight.
However because of this the recordings which can be found are typically quiet. “Mars may be very quiet due to low atmospheric stress,” stated coauthor of the research Baptiste Chide of Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico in a assertion. “However the stress adjustments with the seasons on Mars.” Which means we will anticipate adjustments to the sounds recorded in future. “We’re coming into a high-pressure season,” Chide stated. “Possibly the acoustic atmosphere on Mars will likely be much less quiet than it was after we landed.”
The strangest discovering from the research 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 is determined by its pitch: Low-pitched sounds journey at about 537 mph, and higher-pitched sounds transfer significantly sooner at 559 mph. This appears to be as a result of excessive nature of the skinny, chilly ambiance.
The recordings have 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 Elimination Software which clears rock surfaces of particles. The SuperCam microphone is the primary one getting used for the science work.
“The microphone is now used a number of occasions a day and performs extraordinarily properly; its total efficiency is best than what we had modeled and even examined in a Mars-like atmosphere on Earth,” stated David Mimoun, professor at Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO) and lead of the group that developed the microphone experiment. “We might even file 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 creator of the research. “I anticipate many discoveries to return, utilizing the ambiance as a supply of sound and the medium of propagation.”
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