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NASA’s Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars. The six-month journey to the Red Planet can get pretty boring, but fortunately the car-sized robot found a way to entertain itself in interplanetary space by conducting a brief microphone check.
A microphone installed on the Perseverance rover captured a 60-second audio file of the journey through space, revealing the sounds of the spacecraft as it travels further and further away from Earth.
The Perseverance rover was launched on July 30 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where the rover was tied to a United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V 541 rocket.
An hour after its flight and Perseverance separated from the rocket and officially began its journey to Mars. Once he arrives, he will look for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
On October 19, the rover’s microphone recorded a minute of audio from space, giving us a small snippet of its time as it traveled through deep space.
Hear it here:
The soft hum heard in the clip is actually the sound of Perseverance’s heat rejection fluid pump, which helps the robot maintain temperature so it can still operate during the cold nights it will have to spend on Mars.
Sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space, but sound waves can travel through solid objects. That’s why the only audio captured by the microphone is that which travels through the rover’s heat pump, as it causes mechanical vibrations.
“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 heat rejection fluid pump,” Dave Gruel, lead engineer for the EDL subsystem Mars 2020’s Camera and Microphone, he said in a statement.
A first sound – Perseverance is the first rover to be equipped with a microphone.
The microphone is intended to capture the sounds of Perseverance’s entry into Mars near space, its descent and landing on the Martian surface, when, if all goes according to plan, the rover’s parachute releases, the engines of landing come on and its wheels finally make contact with the dusty surface.
Thanks to that 60-second audio file of mechanical hum, the team behind Perseverance can now rest assured that the mic actually works.
“As great as it is to hear some audio about spacecraft operations in flight, the audio file has a more important meaning,” Gruel said.
“It means our system is working and ready to try and record some of the sound and fury of a Mars landing.”
This is the first time the ground control will try to hear the robot landing on an alien planet, so they’re not quite sure what to expect.
“Getting the sound from landing is a pleasure, not a need,” Gruel said.
Perseverance is expected to arrive on Mars on February 18, 2021.
The robot will land on Jezero Crater, a crater 28 miles wide and 500 meters deep located in a basin slightly north of the Martian equator. Jezero Crater once housed a lake that scientists believe dried up 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.
Once it lands, Perseverance will begin looking for clues to past microbial life that may have existed in the lake during the Red Planet’s ancient history.
The robot will collect rock and soil samples and set them aside for the first mission to return a sample from another planet. The rock samples will be stored in tubes in a well-identified location on the Martian surface and left there to be returned to Earth from a future mission to the Red Planet.
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