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NASA’s next Mars rover is not silent on its long journey to the Red Planet.
A microphone on board the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, which launched on July 30 and will land on February 18, 2021, captured the hum produced by the car-sized robot’s “heat rejection fluid pump”, reveals a newly released audio file from NASA.
That microphone was installed to record the sounds of Perseverance (EDL) entry, descent and landing, the “seven minutes of terror“sequence that will end with an overhead rocket crane lowering the rover to the Martian surface on cables. On October 19, the Mars 2020 team turned on the microphone to determine if this and an associated camera system are working properly, capturing the buzzing sound in the process.
In the photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet
That sound did not travel in the vacuum of space; sound waves need a medium through which to propagate. In this case, the waves passed through Perseverance’s body, causing mechanical vibrations that the microphone recorded.
“Apologizing to the person who came up with the slogan for ‘Alien’, I guess you could say that no one in space could hear you scream, but they can hear your fluid pump repelling the heat,” Dave Gruel, chief engineer for the Mars 2020 EDL camera and microphone subsystem, he said in a statement Wednesday (November 18).
“As great as it is to hear some audio about spacecraft operations in flight, the audio file has a more important meaning,” added Gruel. “It means our system is working and ready to try and record some of the sound and fury of a Mars landing.”
The heat rejection fluid pump is part of Perseverance’s thermal system, which will keep the rover and its instruments on Mars warm by circulating the heat generated by the mission’s nuclear battery, NASA officials said in the statement.
Perseverance will explore the bottom of the 45 kilometer wide Jezero Crater, which in the past housed a lake and a river delta. The rover will characterize the geology of the site, hunting for signs of antiquity Life on Mars and cache samples for future return to Earth, among other activities.
Perseverance will also test technologies for future exploration of the Red Planet. For example, one of the rover’s instruments, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. Such equipment, when enlarged, could help humanity establish a foothold on the Red Planet, NASA officials said.
Flying to Mars attached to Perseverance’s belly is also tiny helicopter called Ingenuity. If all goes to plan, the 4 lbs. The helicopter (1.8 kilograms) will make some short test flights over the Red Planet, becoming the first rotor aircraft ever used for alien skies.
The EDL microphone, built by the Danish company DPA Microphones, is not Perseverance’s only audio equipment. The rover is equipped with a second microphone designed to record the sounds produced by its rock-zapping SuperCam instrument.
Self these microphones they will work, they will be the first ever to record true audio on Mars. (NASA’s InSight lander captured the “sounds” of the Martian wind shortly after his 2018 touchdown, but recording processed data collected by an air pressure sensor and seismometer.)
But the new microphones aren’t the first to fly on a red planet mission. NASA’s Mars Polar Lander spacecraft, which crashed while attempting to land in December 1999, had a microphone. And NASA’s Phoenix lander, which passed its 2008 water hunting mission, had a microphone built into its descent camera. But the Phoenix team never turned on that instrument, out of concern that its use could complicate the landing process.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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