When the rover Perseverance landed on Mars, it was equipped with the first working microphone on the planet’s surface. Scientists have used it to make the first-ever audio recording of an extraterrestrial whirlwind.
When the rover Perseverance landed on Mars, it was equipped with the first working microphone on the planet’s surface. Scientists have used it to make the first-ever audio recording of an extraterrestrial whirlwind.
The study was published in Nature Communications by planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch and a team of researchers at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space and NASA. Roger Wiens, professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences in Purdue University’s College of Science, leads the instrument team that made the discovery. He is the principal investigator of Perseverance’s SuperCam, a suite of tools that comprise the rover’s « head » that includes advanced remote-sensing instruments with a wide range of spectrometers, cameras and the microphone.
« We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools, » Wiens said. « They take readings at regular intervals. The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second.
