During a live broadcast, NASA revealed the first results of one of the seven instruments on the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on February 18. The SuperCam, in addition to capturing images in very high definition, is equipped with a microphone that recorded sounds of the Martian wind as well as, the crackles generated by the laser when it hits a rock.
Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space, in France, and a member of the team responsible for Superman said: “these recordings have demonstrated that our microphone is not only functioning well, but we also have a very high-quality signal for our scientific studies.” The team remains enthusiastic about the potential scientific investigations that can be done with the data obtained by the microphones.
The first point was reached on March 2 by the laser, and was called “Máaz”, which means “Mars” in Navajo. In this process, the affected rock is pulverized and the formed cloud has its composition read by the equipment’s cameras and spectrometers, that is, through light it is possible to know what the entity is made of. Among the main tasks of Perseverance, the one that stands out the most is searching for signs of life, if there was any in the past, in the Jezero crater soil, an old Martian river bed roughly 25 miles in size, in addition to collecting samples that will be brought to Earth in subsequent missions.
The microphone recorded the sound of the Martian wind during from the early days of the Perseverance rover on Mars, as the team announced in a broadcast. In addition, the device captured the crackles produced during the rock spraying by the laser, proving the enormous recording capacity and in good quality. According to Murdoch, this audio will be very useful to the team. Although the spectrometer is able to reveal the composition of the samples collected, it is not able, for example, to say how hard the rocks collected are – “chalk and marble have the same chemical composition”, she adds.
Now, the rover’s next big task is to look for a suitable field for the Ingenuity helicopter to make its demonstration flights. Who knows, soon, we may not have aerial images combined with the sounds captured by Perseverance!
