Latest news with #MarsAtmosphere
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Listen to the eerie sounds of Mars recorded by a NASA rover
A NASA rover ambling over the red desert planet for the past four years has been recording audio of Mars. In this alien world 156 million miles away in space, even the everyday whispers of wind and mechanical parts are exotic to human ears. Scientists say that's because the Martian atmosphere is about 1 percent as dense as Earth's, which alters the volume, speed, and characteristics of sound. How to describe what Perseverance has heard at Jezero crater? Well, it doesn't not sound like the eerie ambient noise of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you can listen for yourself. Like an aspiring DJ or singer-songwriter, Perseverance has a Soundcloud account, where people can experience the latest Martian tracks. NASA shared this week some of the strange audio the rover has captured. You can find a sampling further down in this story. SEE ALSO: A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration When the rover touched down on Mars in 2021, it didn't just bring cameras, drills, and tubes for rock samples. It also carried two microphones — nothing special, just a couple of off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy online. The only modification NASA made was to attach little grids at the end of the mics to protect them from Martian dust. One of the microphones, mounted on the rover's head, is known as the SuperCam and has recorded most of the audio; another is attached to the body. What they've picked up is changing the way scientists think about the Red Planet. This is the first time humanity has ever been able to listen to the din of another world. "We've all seen these beautiful images that we get from Mars," said Nina Lanza, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, in a NASA video, "but having sound to be able to add to those images, it makes me feel like I'm almost right there on the surface." NASA shared Martian audio in the above post on X. Researchers published the first study of acoustics on Mars in the journal Nature, based on Perseverance's recordings, in 2022. Apparently, the Red Planet is a much quieter place than originally thought, and not just because it's unpopulated. It's so silent, in fact, there was a time the rover team believed the mics had stopped working. But Perseverance just wasn't getting much material from its surroundings. That's largely due to Mars' low-atmospheric pressure, though the pressure can vary with the seasons. The team studying these sounds found that Mars' thin air, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, makes sound waves behave differently. On Earth, sound travels at roughly 767 mph. On Mars, deeper pitches move at about 537 mph, with higher ones traveling a bit faster, at 559 mph. The thin atmosphere also causes sound to drop off quickly. A sound that could be heard from 200 feet away on Earth falls silent after 30 feet on Mars. Higher-pitched tones have an even shorter range. The microphones mounted to Perseverance are off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy off the internet. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech "Sounds on Earth have very rich harmonics. You can hear multiple frequencies. It gets a really nice depth to the sound," said Justin Maki, a NASA scientist, in a video. "On Mars, the atmosphere attenuates a lot of those higher frequencies. So you tend to hear the lower frequencies, and it's a much more isolated sound, a little more muted than the sounds we hear on Earth." With this data, scientists have learned that some of their earlier models for how they thought sound should move on Mars missed the mark. "The Martian atmosphere can propagate sound a lot further than we thought it could," Lanza said. Translation: The Red Planet can literally carry a tune.
Asharq Al-Awsat
16-05-2025
- Science
- Asharq Al-Awsat
NASA Rover Observes Aurora on Mars in Visible Light for 1st Time
NASA's Perseverance rover has observed an aurora on Mars in visible light for the first time, with the sky glowing softly in green in the first viewing of an aurora from any planetary surface other than Earth. Scientists said the aurora occurred on March 18, 2024, when super-energetic particles from the sun encountered the Martian atmosphere, precipitating a reaction that created a faint glow across the entire night sky. Auroras have been observed previously on Mars by satellites from orbit in ultraviolet wavelengths, but not in visible light. The sun three days earlier had unleashed a solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection - a huge explosion of gas and magnetic energy that brings with it large amounts of solar energetic particles - that traveled outward through the solar system. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, following Mercury, Venus and Earth. Scientists had simulated the event in advance and prepared instruments on the rover to be ready to observe the expected aurora. Perseverance has two instruments that are sensitive to wavelengths in the visible range, meaning they detect colors human eyes can see. The researchers used the rover's SuperCam spectrometer instrument to identify exactly the wavelength of the green glow and then used its Mastcam-Z camera to take a snapshot of the softly glowing green sky. An aurora forms on Mars the same way as on Earth, with energetic charged particles colliding with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, exciting them, and causing subatomic particles called electrons to emit light particles called photons. "But on Earth, the charged particles are channeled into the polar regions by our planet's global magnetic field," said Elise Wright Knutsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo's Center for Space Sensors and Systems and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances. "Mars has no global magnetic field so the charged particles bombarded all of Mars at the same time, which leads to this planet-wide aurora," Reuters quoted Knutsen as saying. The green color occurred because of the interaction between the charged particles from the sun and oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. While auroras can be brilliant, as often seen in Earth's northernmost and southernmost regions, the one observed on Mars was quite faint. "This specific aurora we observed on March 18th of last year would have been too faint for humans to see directly. But if we get a more intense solar storm, it could become bright enough for future astronauts to see. And with a camera, such as an iPhone, you would clearly see it, rather like how an aurora on Earth is always brighter in images than with the naked eye," Knutsen said. This particular event did not impact Earth. All the planets with atmospheres in our solar system experience auroras. "Various types and wavelengths of aurora have been observed previously from Mars-orbiting satellites. All previous observations have been in the UV, but they have had wildly different shapes. From the global, diffuse aurora we observed now, to discrete arcs and patches near the crustal fields (regional magnetic fields) in the south, and large-scale sinuous shapes," Knutsen said. If astronauts from Earth visit Mars and perhaps establish a long-term presence on the planet's surface, they may be treated to a nighttime light show. "During a more intense solar storm, producing a brighter aurora, I think a sky which glows green from horizon to horizon will be eerily beautiful," Knutsen said. "The aurora will appear as a soft green glow covering more or less the whole sky," Knutsen added. "Dust in the lower part of the atmosphere would obscure some of the light towards the horizon, and if you looked straight up it would also be fainter simply because looking at a slant angle will allow you to see through a thicker section of the atmosphere that is emitting the aurora."
