The Mars rover captures the first sound of a dust devil on the Red Planet

Cape Canaveral, Florida – What does a dust devil sound like on Mars? A NASA roaming microphone was triggered by accident when a tower of red dust passed just above his head, recording the paddle.

It takes about 10 seconds for not only gusts of 25 mph gusts, but hundreds of dust particles to whiz against the rover’s tenacity. Scientists made the first sound of its kind on Tuesday.

It sounds strikingly similar to dust devils on Earth, though it’s quieter because Mars’ thin atmosphere makes sounds more muffled and winds less strong, according to the researchers.

The dust devil came and went over persistence quickly last year, and thus the short length of the sound, said Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of the study that appears in Nature Communications. At the same time, the parked rover’s navigation camera took pictures, while a weather observation instrument collected data.

“She was caught completely in the act by Percy,” said co-author German Martinez of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Decades filmed on Mars But no one has heard of it yet. Dust devils abound in the Red Planet. This was in the middle range: no less than 400 feet high and 80 feet wide, traveling at 16 feet per second.

Murdoch, who helped build it, said the microphone picked up 308 sounds of dust as the dust devil whipped.

With the rover’s SuperCam microphone playing for less than three minutes every few days, Murdoch said it was “certainly fortunate” that the dust devil appeared when it appeared on September 27, 2021. She estimates there was only a 1 in -200 chance of catching a dust sound. evil.

Of the 84 minutes collected in its first year, she wrote in an e-mail from France, “there is only one recording of the Dust Devil.”

That’s the same The microphone on the Perseverance mast provided the first sounds from Mars – a Martian wind – shortly after The rover lands in February 2021. And she continued with The sound of the rover while driving And for him Escort helicopter, a little creativity, flying nearby, In addition to the crackling of the rover’s laser beams, which are the main cause of the microphone.

Murdoch said these recordings allow scientists to study Martian winds, atmospheric turbulence and dust movement now as never before. The results “illustrate the value of acoustic data in space exploration.”

on rock hollows that may contain signs of ancient microbial life, Perseverance collected 18 samples Yet at Jezero Crater, once the scene of a river delta. NASA plans to return these samples to Earth a decade from now. The helicopter recorded 36 creative flights, the longest of which took nearly three minutes.