NASA’s Perseverance rover has started zapping Mars rocks with lasers – and recording the sound.
NASA recently released a 10-second audio clip of Perseverance’s lasers firing at the red planet. When they hit the surface of Mars, a rhythmic click can be heard, like an alien metronome.
A microphone attached to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument collected audio from 30 laser impacts on March 12, some slightly louder than others. The staccato puppets in the recording are the sound of the laser rock evaporating.
The lasers hit a rock called “Máaz” (which means Mars in the Navajo language), 3 meters from the rover. By making the rover zap the surface of Mars in this way, scientists can learn more about how hard rocks like Máaz are, and what they are made of.
“If we tap on a surface that is loud, we will not hear the same sound as when we shoot on a surface that is soft,” astronomer Naomi Murdoch, a member of the SuperCam team, told the BBC.
Máaz turned out to be a basalt rock, made of magnesium and iron.
Sounds from another planet
These aren’t the first sounds that persistence has beamed back to Earth.
A few days after the rover landed on Mars in February, it caught the sound of a Martian breeze. The clip was the first audio recording scientists had ever collected from the surface of another planet.
Engineers equipped Perseverance with two microphones. The Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) Cam microphone was primarily intended to record landing sounds, although it failed, and also to collect audio from Perseverance’s journey through space. Launched in July from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the rover has traveled nearly 300 million miles to reach Mars.
The other microphone, attached to the rover’s SuperCam, was designed to listen for sounds from the rover after it landed on the surface of Mars.
According to Dave Gruel, NASA’s chief engineer for Perseverance’s camera and microphone systems, both microphones will continue to collect audio for the remainder of the rover’s mission. The robot is ready to spend the next two years searching Mars’s Jezero crater for signs of ancient alien life and collecting rock samples.
“We know the public is fascinated by the exploration of Mars, so we added the EDL Cam microphone to the vehicle as we hoped it would improve the experience, especially for visually impaired space fans, and engage people around the world and inspire, ”he said in a NASA press release.
Perseverance is NASA’s fifth and most advanced Mars rover. The agency previously equipped two Mars spacecraft with microphones: the Mars Polar Lander and the Phoenix lander. But the microphone on the former did not work, and the latter never turned on its microphone.
NASA’s InSight lander, which landed on Mars in 2018, also allowed scientists to listen to the Martian wind, but in a different way. The lander is equipped with a seismometer to study earthquakes on Mars, so the tool can also detect vibrations caused by the wind during gusts of wind across InSight’s solar panels.
The low tones of these vibrations are audible to the human ear.
Morgan McFall-Johnsen contributed to the reporting of this story.
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