Unprecedented audio recordings made by NASA’s Perseverance rover take us to the surface of the Red Planet, allowing us to hear the sound of a gentle alien breeze and the clicking clicks of lasers zapping a Mars rock.
We’ve been on the Perseverance mission for exactly three weeks, so it’s still early. The project is in the deployment phase, with the Mars 2020 team systematically deploying each of the rover’s many instruments to ensure they are working correctly and configured for the scientific phase of the mission. Persistence will spend the next two years or more exploring the Jezero Crater, so there’s no need to rush things.
The team recently rolled out the rover’s aptly named name SuperCam, in an early showcase of the instrument’s enormous potential. Attached to the rover’s mast, the 12-pound (5.4kilogramSuperCam can perform five different types of geological analysis, allowing the team to select the best rocks for sampling.
These explorations are important from a geological perspective, but also from an astrobiological perspective. Rocks in the Jezero Crater – a former lake – may contain fossils or other biomarkers that indicate former microbial life. While the main purpose of the ongoing Curiosity mission was to determine if Mars was ever habitable (apparently used to be), the Perseverance rover is actually looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different from inhabited; Mars may have once promoted the conditions for life, but that doesn’t mean life really took root on the Red Planet).
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The SuperCam tool was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a consortium of French laboratories led by the Center National d’Etudes SpatialesThe first data package from SuperCam was recently received at the control center of the French space agency in Toulouse, according to to a NASA statement. Newly released SuperCam images show a pair of rocks named Yeehgo and Máaz in beautiful detail.
“It’s amazing to see that SuperCam works so well on Mars,” Roger Wiens, SuperCam’s lead researcher, said in the statement. “When we first came up with this instrument eight years ago, we were concerned that we were far too ambitious. Now it works like a charm up there. “
Perseverance is also unique in that it is able to record sounds on Mars. NASA has provided three different audio clips, including the first acoustic recording of laser shots on Mars and the sound of Martian winds.
Perseverance registered the laser sounds at a distance of 10 feet (3.1 meters) from the target rock. The clicking sounds produced by the laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to infer different physical characteristics of the target, such as harshness.
“SuperCam really gives our rover the eyes to see promising rock monsters and ears to hear what it sounds like when the lasers hit them,” explains Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA.headquarters in Washington, DC, in the statement. “This information will be essential in determining which samples to store and ultimately return to Earth through our groundbreaking Mars Sample Return campaign, which will be one of the most ambitious achievements humanity has ever undertaken.”
The future mission What Zurbuchen is referring to will be quite historical, as the samples cached by Perseverance would represent the first Martian material sent back to Earth for analysis.
The Mars 2020 team has also rolled out and received data from the rover’s visible and infrared sensor, one of the SuperCam sensorsThis instrument collects reflected sunlight, revealing the mineral content of rocks and sediments.
SuperCam ‘s Raman spectrometer also produces data, a feat that is now the first time spectroscopy has been done anywhere other than Earth, Olivier Beyssac, CNRS research director at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, pointed out the NASA statement. Raman spectroscopy works by shooting light – specifically green laser beams – at a target object, such as a rock. This non-destructive technique shows how light interacts with chemical bonds in the target and provides information about the chemical structure of the object, internal stress levels and other information.
“Raman spectroscopy will play a critical role in characterizing minerals to gain a deeper understanding of the geological conditions under which they formed and to detect potential organic and mineral molecules that may have been formed by living organisms,” Beyssac said.
Looking ahead, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the rover’s driveability (it’s already clocked 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]), and choose an airfield from which to deploy the Ingenuity helicopter.