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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 Perseverance of the rover March 2020, which launched on July 30 and will arrive on February 18, 2021, captured the hum of the car-sized robot’s ‘heat rejection fluid pump’, a NASA audio file recently revealed. published.
This microphone was installed to record the sounds of entry, descent and landing (EDL) of Perseverance, the “seven minutes of terror“sequence that will end with a rocket-powered sky crane lowering the rover to the Martian surface on cables. The March 2020 team turned on the mic on October 19 to determine if it and an associated camera system are functioning properly , capturing the roar of sound in the process.
In photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet
This sound did not pass through the void of space; sound waves need a medium by which to propagate. In this case, the waves passed through Perseverance’s body, causing mechanical vibrations recorded by the microphone.
“With my apologies to the person who coined the tagline ‘Alien’ I guess you could say that in space no one might be able to hear you screaming, but they can hear your heat rejection fluid pump , “Dave Gruel, Chief Engineer of the EDL Camera and Microphone Subsystem for March 2020, said in a press release Wednesday (November 18).
“As great as it is to capture some audio about the operations of the spacecraft in flight, the sound file has more meaning,” Gruel added. “This means our system is working and is ready to try and record some of the sound and fury of a Mars landing.”
The heat rejection fluid pump is part of the Perseverance thermal system, which will keep the rover and its instruments warm on Mars by circulating heat generated by the mission’s nuclear battery, NASA officials said in the report. communicated.
Perseverance will explore the bottom of the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater, which housed a lake and a river delta in the ancient past. The rover will characterize the geology of the site, look for traces of ancient Life on Mars and caching samples for future return to Earth, among other tasks.
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, if scaled up, could help humanity gain a foothold on the Red Planet, NASA officials said.
Also flying to Mars attached to Perseverance’s belly is a tiny helicopter called Ingenuity. If all goes as planned, the 4 pounds. (1.8 kilograms) the helicopter will perform a few short test flights over the Red Planet, becoming the first rotorcraft to fly in alien skies.
The EDL microphone, which was built by 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.
Yes these microphones work, they will be the first to record real sound on Mars. (NASA’s InSight lander captured the “sounds” of the Martian wind shortly after landing in 2018, but this 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 touch down in December 1999, sported a microphone. And NASA’s Phoenix lander, which completed its flush mission in 2008, had a microphone built into its descent camera. But the Phoenix team never lit this instrument, fearing that its use would complicate the landing process.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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