{"id":4065,"date":"2022-04-20T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-20T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=4065"},"modified":"2022-04-06T04:14:35","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T04:14:35","slug":"weve-heard-mars-for-the-first-time-thanks-to-the-perseverance-rover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/weve-heard-mars-for-the-first-time-thanks-to-the-perseverance-rover\/","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019ve Heard Mars For the First Time Thanks to the Perseverance Rover"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s taken at least a year of work, but French scientists have now managed to release their results from a study that started mere hours after the famous Perseverance rover<\/a> landed on Mars; now, using sound recording from the rover\u2019s onboard SuperCam2 instrument, we can now hear the first-ever recorded sounds from the Red Planet<\/a>\u2014and it has some stories to tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A press release from the<\/a> Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)<\/a> revealed their historical findings, which are now currently set for publication in the journal Nature<\/em><\/a>. The team was composed of several scientists working together to enable this feat, with experts from the University of Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier<\/a>, CNRS, and the Institut Sup\u00e9rieur de l’A\u00e9ronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO)<\/a> leading the charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The SuperCam instrument aboard the Perseverance rover is located at the top of the rover and is responsible for some of the rover\u2019s imaging capabilities. (NASA\/JPL-Caltech, 2019)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Some 18 hours after its descent and eventual landing on the surface of Mars, the Perseverance rover<\/a> began recording sounds near its vicinity using the microphone aboard the rover\u2019s SuperCam 3, which was built under the supervision of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sounds picked up by the microphone were between the 20 Hz and 20 kHz range, which places the sounds well within the range of human hearing. However, the sounds reveal Mars to be an almost-entirely silent red landscape, with little movements on its surface to become sources of distinct sounds aside from the rover itself\u2014which in itself isn\u2019t too surprising given the planet\u2019s distinct lack of an atmosphere to carry sound waves far enough. In fact, Mars was so silent that the scientists inside Mission Control in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)<\/a> thought the microphone was initially unresponsive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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