Nasa news audio8/12/2023 ![]() ![]() The roughly 10-ft.-long Perseverance rover launched on July 30th, 2020 and touched Martian soil on February 18th, 2021. Sometimes it helps to be lucky in science!” “Had the been pointing in a different direction or the microphone observation been scheduled just a few seconds later, key pieces of the story would be missing. “I can’t think of a previous case where so much data from so many instruments contributed to characterizing a single dust devil,” said John Edward Moores, a planetary scientist at York University. In this case, that preparation - and no small degree of luck - paid off. That meant timing them for when dust devils are most likely to hit while pointing its cameras where they’re most likely to approach. The rover only records sound snippets lasting under three minutes and only does so eight times per month. Scientists had to coordinate their instruments to boost the odds of recording a storm. Perseverance also captured images (also included in the recording) of the approaching storm. (Although that may sound intimidating, this relatively minor storm didn’t damage the rover.) As you can hear below (via Science News), the clip includes a brief pause in the turbulence as the dust devil’s eye passes over the rover. Scientists estimate the recorded whirlwind measured about 82 feet wide by 387 feet high. It can erode a spacecraft’s heat shields, damage scientific instruments, incapacitate parachutes and smother solar panels. “We could actually count them.”ĭust is a significant factor in planning for Mars missions. “As the dust devil passed over Perseverance we could actually hear individual impacts of grains on the rover,” Naomi Murdoch, planetary scientist and the author of new report, told The Washington Post. To the casual ear, it sounds similar to a microphone picking up a wind gust on Earth, but scientists can learn much more. The rover's microphones picked up the dust devil on September 27th, 2021. But the clip not only treats us to the novelty of hearing an extraterrestrial vortex it could also help scientists better understand how dust might affect future Mars missions. To that end, if you’re looking for some more off-Earth bops, check out these real recordings from Mars, the songs of gravitational waves, and the resonances of planetary systems.NASA announced today that the Perseverance rover has captured audio from a Martian dust devil for the first time. But it is just one of many trippy earworms from the space sonification genre, in which astronomical data of all kinds is converted into sound waves. The effect is so chilling that it would seem totally at home in a Halloween playlist. To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective). ![]() “In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time.”Īs it turns out, the sound waves in their natural environment are a whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone. “In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before… because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory,” NASA said in a statement. Though the acoustic signals generated by the black hole were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear-until now. ![]()
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