Our growing list of sounds on Mars now contains lasers.
NASAs Perseverance has begun using its rock-zapping SuperCam instrument on the Red Planet, mission team members announced today (March 10). SuperCam is equipped with a microphone, which has picked up the gentle hiss of the Martian wind, as well as the not-so-soft snapshots generated by the laser when it hits a rock target.
“These recordings have shown that our microphone not only works well, but we also have a very high quality signal for our scientific studies,” said Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l ‘, of the SuperCam team. Espace in Toulouse, France, he said during a live webcast today
“At the SuperCam team, we are very excited about the perspectives and scientific research that we will be able to do with the microphone data,” said Murdoch.
Related: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet in photos
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The car-sized endurance, the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, landed on the floor of Jezero Crater on February 18The rover’s main tasks are to search for signs of ancient life within the 28-mile-wide Jezero, which housed a deep lake and river delta billions of years ago, and collect dozens of samples for future return to Earth.
SuperCam, which sits on Perseverance’s head-like mast, is one of seven scientific instruments the rover will use to do this alien work. SuperCam fires a laser at targets up to 7 meters away, creating a cloud of evaporated rock, the composition of which can be determined by the instrument’s cameras and spectrometers.
As Murdoch and her colleagues announced today, such rock zapping has already begun. SuperCam fired at a target called Máaz, the Navajo word for Mars, on March 2. (Perseverance explores part of Jezero that the team named Canyon de Chelly, after a national monument on Navajo land in northeastern Arizona.)
Thanks to the SuperCam observations, the team was able to determine that Máaz has a basalt-like composition. Basalt is an igneous or volcanic rock that is common on both Mars and Earth. But it’s unclear at this point if Máaz herself is volcanic, said SuperCam lead researcher Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in New Mexico.
It is also possible that Máaz is “a sedimentary rock made up of igneous granules washed downstream in Lake Jezero and cemented together,” Wiens said during today’s update.
The SuperCam microphone recorded audio from the Martian wind during Perseverance’s early days on Mars, the instrumentation team announced today. The microphone also captured the countless rapid-fire snapshots of the Máaz work, which resulted from shock waves generated by the heat and vibrations of the rock’s evaporation.
Such audio will be quite useful to the SuperCam team, Murdoch said. For example, details of the snapshots will reveal the hardness of each rock target, a detail that cannot be determined by composition alone. (Chalk and marble have the same chemical makeup, as Murdoch noted.)
SuperCam recordings will also help the Perseverance team keep an eye on the rover and its various subsystems and allow researchers to better understand the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Mars atmosphere, Murdoch said.
Perseverance has a different microphone also – one built into the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) camera system. The EDL microphone did not pick up sound during the rover’s “seven minutes of terror” landing on Feb. 18, but it did pick up sound on the surface of Mars.
These two microphones are the first to record real audio on Mars. And they can work together at some point; members of the mission team have the option of operate both microphones at the same time to capture stereo sound on the Red Planet.
Perseverance has not yet seriously begun its scientific work. The first major task for the rover is to find a suitable airfield for the rover’s helicopter, a 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) vessels called Ingenuity, to make its technology-demonstrating flights.
Persistence will try to document Ingenuity’s forays into the Martian sky. And this could even be a multimedia extravaganza: It’s possible that one or both microphones could pick up the sounds of Ingenuity’s rotors spinning through the thin air of Mars, members of the mission team have said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the quest for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.