The Perseverance rover captured the world’s imagination when it recorded sounds from the surface of Mars shortly after its arrival on the red planet in 2021. It recorded sounds of the Martian wind, as well as the noises it made itself, and it even managed to capture the sounds of the Ingenuity helicopter in action. Now, scientists have analyzed these recordings to learn about how sound propagates on Mars, and found that the speed of sound isn’t constant there — it depends on the sound’s pitch.
But this means that the recordings which are available tend to be quiet. “Mars is very quiet because of low atmospheric pressure,” said coauthor of the study Baptiste Chide of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in a statement. “But the pressure changes with the seasons on Mars.” That means we can expect changes to the sounds recorded in future. “We are entering a high-pressure season,” Chide said. “Maybe the acoustic environment on Mars will be less quiet than it was when we landed.
The recordings were made using Perseverance’s two microphones: One on its SuperCam instrument, used to hear the sounds made when a laser strikes its rock target to perform spectroscopy, and a second which records the sounds of puffs of air from the Gaseous Dust Removal Tool which clears rock surfaces of debris. The SuperCam microphone is the main one being used for the science work.
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