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NASA’s Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars. The six-month trip to the Red Planet can get rather boring, but luckily the car-sized robot has found a way to entertain itself in interplanetary space – by performing a brief mic check.
A microphone installed on the Perseverance rover captured a 60-second audio file of the space travel, revealing the sounds of the spacecraft as it moved further and further away from Earth.
The Perseverance rover was launched on July 30 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, where the rover was attached to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket.
An hour after the start of its flight, Perseverance separated from the rocket and officially began its journey to Mars. Once there, 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 little bit of its time through deep space.
Listen to it here:
The subdued buzz heard in the clip is actually the sound of Perseverance’s heat rejection fluid pump, which helps the robot maintain temperatures so it can still function through 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. This is why the only sound picked up by the microphone is that which passes through the heat pump of the rover, because it causes mechanical vibrations.
“With my apologies to the person who coined the tagline for ‘Alien,’ I guess you could say that in space no one might be able to hear you screaming, but they can hear your release fluid pump from. heat, ”Dave Gruel, engineering manager for the March 2020 EDL camera and microphone subsystem, said in a statement.
A sonic first – Perseverance is the first rover to be equipped with a microphone.
The microphone is intended to capture the sounds of Perseverance entering space near Mars, descending and landing on the Martian surface, when, if all goes as planned, the rover’s parachute breaks free, the landing motors ignite and its wheels. finally come into contact with the dusty surface.
Thanks to this 60-second, mechanical whirring audio file, the team behind Perseverance can now be confident that the microphone is working fine.
“As great as it is to pick up a bit of audio about the operations of spacecraft in flight, the audio file has more meaning,” Gruel said.
“This means our system is working and is ready to try and record some of the sound and fury of a Mars landing.”
This is the first time that ground control will try to listen to the robot landing on an alien planet, so they are not sure what to expect.
“Getting sound on landing is a good thing to have, not a necessity,” Gruel said.
Perseverance is supposed to arrive on Mars on February 18, 2021.
The robot will land on Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide and 500-meter-deep crater located in a basin slightly north of the Martian equator. Jezero Crater was once home to a lake that scientists say 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 at the start of the Red Planet’s history.
The robot will collect rock and soil samples and set them aside for the very first mission to return samples 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 by a future mission to the Red Planet.
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