PARIS: The first audio recordings from Mars reveal a quiet earth with occasional gusts of wind where two different pets of sound would have a strange belated effect on hail, scientists said on Friday.
After NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February last time, its two microphones started recording, allowing scientists to hear what it’s like on the Red Planet for the first time.
In a study published in the Nature journal on Friday, the scientists gave their first analysis of the five hours of sound picked up by Perseverance’s microphones.
The audio revealed preliminarily unknown turbulence on Mars, said Sylvestre Maurice, the study’s main author and scientificco-director of the shoebox-sized SuperCam mounted on the rover’s mast which has the main microphone.
The transnational platoon heeded to breakouts by the bitsy Imagination copter, a family craft to Perseverance, and heard the rover’s ray zap jewels to study their chemical composition — which made a “ clack clack” sound, Maurice said.
The study verified for the first time that the speed of sound is slower on Mars, travelling at 240 metres per second, compared to Earth’s 340 metres per second.
This had been anticipated because Mars’ atmosphere is 95 per cent carbon dioxide and is about 100 times thinner, making sound 20 rattle weaker, the study said.
But the scientists were surprised when the sound made by the ray took 250 metres a alternate — 10 metres briskly than anticipated.
They had discovered there are two pets of sound on the face of Mars — one for high-pitched sounds like the zap of the ray, and another for lower frequentness like the hum of the copter rotor.
This means that mortal cognizance would hear high-pitched sounds slightly before.
