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Many consider the various rovers we have sent to Mars the best alternative to sending a geologist to the Red Planet. Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity have brought all the necessary equipment similar to that used by human geologists on Earth, and they can navigate the terrain, “see” the landscape with the various cameras, take rock and dust samples with shovels, and then analyze. them with various tools and equipment on board.
On top of all those things, the new 2020 Perseverance Mars rover will add a “sense of hearing” to your robotic toolkit. The rover includes a pair of microphones to allow us to hear, for the first time, what Mars really sounds like.
Perseverance is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, 2021 at Jezero Crater.
“It’s amazing all the science that we can get with an instrument as simple as a microphone on Mars,” said Baptiste Chide, a planetary science postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a contributor to the SuperCam microphone.
The SuperCam instrument is located on top of the rover’s neck and includes one of the two microphones in Perseverance. This microphone will be used for two things: science and engineering.
On the scientific side, it will record audio of the natural sounds on Mars: wind, storms, and any other ambient noise on Mars. Since the SuperCam microphone is located on the remote sensing pole of the mobile, it can point in the direction of a possible sound source.
But there is another part of the science of “listening” on Mars. The SuperCam is an upgraded version of the Curiosity rover’s laser removal ChemCam. Like its predecessor, SuperCam uses an infrared laser beam to heat and vaporize rocks and regoliths. The microphone can record the sound of the laser blasting rocks, and the resulting blast will give scientists clues about the rock’s composition and hardness.
On the engineering side, the microphone will hear the rover at work, providing information on things like how the mast turns, the wheels turn, or how other instruments work. This can be an important engineering diagnostic tool.
The second mic will be a true “mic drop”. A microphone will try to record the sounds during mission entry, descent and landing (EDL), which will be nail-biting and super fiddly. You can capture, for example, the sounds of pyrotechnic devices being fired to release the parachute, Martian winds, wheels creaking on the Martian surface, and roaring engines of the descending vehicle as you fly away from the rover.
Interestingly, the audio you record will be paired with the full color video taken by EDL cameras. This will allow viewers to experience what landing on Mars looks and sounds like for the first time.
JPL says this mic is out of the box, with a setting.
“We put a little grill at the end of the microphone to protect it from Martian dust,” said Dave Gruel, Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager and EDL microphone and camera leader at JPL.
Scientists caution, however, that the audio sounds collected by Perseverance may not sound exactly the same on Mars as they do in our ears on Earth. This is because the Martian atmosphere is only 1% denser than the Earth’s atmosphere on the surface and has a different composition than ours, which affects the emission and propagation of sound.
But the discrepancy between the sounds of Earth and Mars would be much less dramatic than, say, someone’s voice before and after inhaling helium from a balloon, engineers say. While scientists are trying to predict as best they can how things will sound, they won’t know for sure until Perseverance is on the Red Planet. Regardless of what they find out, Gruel said, “I think it’s going to be great to hear sounds from another planet.”
However, this is not the first time a microphone has been sent to Mars. The Planetary Society has been part of several attempts to use a microphone from Mars, but none have been successful so far. The first was on the Mars Polar Lander, but that spacecraft crashed while descending to Mars on December 3, 1999.
A microphone was later included as part of the descent imager on NASA’s Phoenix lander in 2007, but the microphone never turned on because engineers had detected a possible electronic problem in the microphone that could affect other systems. . A microphone was part of the early design discussions for Curiosity, but due to budget constraints, the microphone was cut off.
The first sounds can be sent back to Earth and made available for the public to hear within days after landing, with a more processed version released about a week after that. The computer will process the sounds, with the help of audio experts, to hear the most interesting sounds more clearly.
While you wait for Perseverance to land, NASA has a new interactive online experience that lets you hear what things might sound like on Mars.
You can listen to other recordings of NASA engineers in this press release.
March 2020 NASA rover website.
