For the first time, project planners hope, NASA’s Perseverance rover will collect sounds from Mars, starting with the spacecraft falling into the environment until its landing at Jezero Crater.
Perseverance will land on February 18, 2021 in a series of dicy landings similar to that of its predecessor Curiosity, who survived “seven minutes of terror” in 2012 with parachute and a “heavenly crane”. The microphones aboard the Perseverance will pick up the sounds of this epic landing and then assist the rover in its clinical investigations on the surface.
The two microphones connected to Perseverance mean that when the rover arrives, it will be to listen to Mars, not just to see it, touch it and “test” (chemically analyzed) as its predecessors did.
Pictured: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover project to the planet
One of the microphones will fly in the perseverance input, descent and landing system (EDL). Engineers will pay attention as Perseverance launches his parachute into the thin environment of Mars, while pointing exactly where he needs to land on the surface.
The “brains” of the EDL microphone are securely located in the rover’s body, communicating with the “ear” on the appearance of the rover’s body. This ear will pay attention to the wind and dust that rush into the dangerous landing procedure and you will be able to hear the atmospheric frictions that are felt through the spacecraft.
But this microphone will probably be short-lived, according to a NASA document, because it was made from typical store-bought hardware. Perseverance’s team expects the EDL microphone to hear only the landing itself, can hear the wind and pick up vehicle sounds such as swivel wheels, engines and heat pumps, if it survives the complicated descent.
A microphone at the moment is a component of the SuperCam system, which will fire a laser at the rocks to penetrate them and read about their composition. One of SuperCam’s goals is to identify biological compounds that may be similar to beyond life on Mars, which makes the tool essential to perseverance’s broader goal, to perceive how habitable Mars for microbes in the oldest.
The microphone will give scientists more information about what SuperCam is studying, according to the same NASA document. Just as the instrument laser vaporizes the rock to create anything SuperCam’s recording tools can study, vaporization will create an “emerging” surprise wave that the microphone will record from its location in the vehicle itself. By analyzing this “burst,” scientists can measure the hardness of the vaporized rock, providing clues about its formation.
According to NASA, the SuperCam microphone can have compatibility for approximately 3.5 minutes at a time with clinical observations from the regimen. Scientists hope that the laser that sprays your targets won’t be the only sound picked up by the microphone. Other captured sounds could possibly come with grains of sand scraping the Martian surface, the wind spinning around the rover’s mast and perhaps, if the rover is in the right position at the right time, the “screams” of the dust swirls in the near range, which preceded the rovers have noticed but not heard.
The microphone can also capture the sounds of Perseverance’s activities, such as its wheels spinning in dust, its moving arm or its used sampling tools and mechanisms. Eavesdropping on the microphone means that if one of those systems breaks down, the recorded sounds can simply be diagnosed and mitigated by what went wrong, as well as the popular images and videos that Perseverance will send from the surface.
While the eight spacecraft of the past made it safely to the surface of Mars, none of them were able to deploy microphones. Either such a generation wasn’t aboard the spacecraft in the first place, or the device or spacecraft failed.
The Planetary Society, which designed the microphone for the Mars Polar Lander, said in a statement that it was moving forward even though it all heard the sounds of Mars after waiting patiently for more than 20 years.
“We’ve been looking at Mars from a rover point of view for a long time,” Greg Delory, CEO and co-founder of hardware company Helio, said in the statement. Delory advises the SuperCam microphone team and helped design the Planetary Society’s 1999 Mars microphone.
“To be to carry some other meaning to our understanding of Mars is going to be amazing,” he said.
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