These voices are truly otherworldly.
NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded the sound of Mars for 60 seconds on Saturday (February 20), only two days before Mars flight Perfect picture touchdown inside Jezero Crater. The newly released document features the mechanical whistling sound of a mobile vehicle and the rustling of the red planet’s breeze. It is the first real audio ever captured on the surface of a planet outside the Earth.
Dave Gruel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said at a press conference on Monday (February 22): “It’s really neat and tidy if you want People are at a loss. The audio was made public in the briefing, Jaw-dropping video During the entry, descent and landing (EDL) period on February 1
Epic video: Watch the Perseverance Rover Land on Mars
Live Update: NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission
Gruel is responsible for Perseverance’s EDL camera system, which includes off-the-shelf commercial microphones manufactured by the Danish company DPA Microphones. The instrument could have captured the sound during the “seven minutes of horror” touchdown at the rover, but since Gruel and his colleagues were investigating, they did not do so. The microphone quickly came back to life, but a historic sound clip was recorded on Saturday.
Perseverance is at the core of NASA’s $2.7 billion “Mars 2020” mission, and it also carries a second microphone-built into its dynamic SuperCam instrument.
SuperCam is not up and running yet. The team is still conducting health checks on Hengxin’s instruments and subsystems. After SuperCam is online, the microphone will help the mission team determine the characteristics of the target rocks, reveal their hardness and whether they have a thin coating. The microphone can also capture various other sounds, such as the Martian breeze and the dust under the constant wheel.
By consistently using EDL and SuperCam microphones, Perseverance can record stereo sound on Mars at some point. However, there is no guarantee. The EDL microphone is not optimized for use on the harsh and cold Martian surface, so it’s not clear how long it will last. The gruel told Space.com last week.
If everything goes according to plan, then “Mars 2020” is an ambitious mission that will advance the exploration of the “Red Planet” in many ways. For example, Perseverance will look for signs of ancient Martian life on the floor of Jerzero, who owned a delta of lakes and rivers billions of years ago.The rover will also collect and cache dozens of samples, and the joint battle between NASA and the European Space Agency will return to Earth As early as 2031.
Several technical demonstrations were also carried out for this mission. An instrument called MOXIE (“Mars Oxygen Field Resource Utilization Experiment”) is designed to produce oxygen from a thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide.the other is The originality of the Mars helicopterAims to be the first rotorcraft ever to fly in a world other than Earth.
Ingenuity’s test event will be the first large-scale event that the mission team will start after gaining perseverance. The flight of the 4 lb (1.8 kg) chopper is expected to take place this spring, and one or two microphones may record historical records.
High frequency sound will decay quickly The atmosphere of Mars, Its density is only 1% of the earth. But mission team members told Space.com that the microphone might be able to pick up some low-pitched rotors.
Gruel said that such audio will have value beyond the scientific insights they provide, thereby helping to bring the “red planet” closer to all of us.
At the press conference on Monday, he told a story about a conversation he had during his JPL tour several years ago. A tour participant was particularly excited about the microphone in the Perseverance project. Gruel asked why, and she replied that her sister had visual impairments and therefore could not get the same enjoyment and inspiration from the Martian rover photos that most of us take for granted.
“That has been bothering me,” Gruul said.
He added: “I wish I had actually mastered that person’s name.” “I want to contact her now and say,’We did it. I hope your sister likes it.'”
Although the newly released recording shows the first real Martian audio, this is not the first sound of any kind captured on “Red Planet.” NASA’s InSight lander “Hear” Martian Wind After processing data collected by barometric sensors and seismometers, shortly after the touchdown in November 2018.
Mike Wall (Mike Wall) is “outside“(Grand Central Press, 2018; Karl Tate illustration), this is a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow him on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook we.
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