The Opportunity rover has been collecting data from Mars and sending us images of its surface since it landed on the red planet in 2004. NASA experts who launched the mission expected it to last 90 Martian days – to define them, usually uses the term ‘sun’; In this case, they are equivalent to 92 and a half terrestrial -, but this device weighing 185 kilos and around a meter and a half long has proven to be especially resistant. The six-wheeled vehicle has continued to explore the surroundings of Meriadiani Planum, the plain where it landed, until June 10, 2018, when a major dust storm struck it.
At the moment, it has not been possible to reestablish contact with Opportunity, although it is possible that the wind will eventually clear the solar panels that supply power to the spacecraft, as has happened on other occasions, and that it continues its work. During this time, the information it has provided has been decisive in, for example, establishing that water shaped large areas of Mars in the past . In fact, in the aforementioned Meriadiani Planum – in this time, the robot has traveled about 45 kilometers from the point where it landed – hematite has been found, an iron oxide that often appears on our planet in ponds and hydrothermal formations .
Images turned into sounds
Now, a team of researchers from the universities of Anglia Ruskin and Exeter, in the United Kingdom, has presented what they call “the soundtrack of the Martian dawn”, a piece of just over two minutes that they have built from an image of the sunrise taken by the aforementioned rover on February 16, 2018. It was the 5,000th dawn I was photographing.
To do this, physicist and composer Domenico Vicinanza and professor Genevieve Williams, who specializes in biomechanics, scanned the snapshot from left to right and analyzed it pixel by pixel. Each one was assigned a tone based on its color and brightness – the algorithm they used assigned the highest to the brightest – and, in the case of those in an area occupied by land, their elevation.
This technique, known as data sonification, has been used in different fields, such as, for example, in the study of volcanic eruptions, storms and other atmospheric phenomena, the trajectory that particles follow under certain conditions or even waves gravitational.
The contrast between the lowest sounds, which correspond to the areas of the image in which the darkest tones dominate, and the highest, which appear when the scanner reached the position of the star king, in the center of that one, can be seen clearly.
The work, titled Mars Soundscapes , notably caught the attention of those attending the last SC18 Supercomputing Conference in Dallas (USA), where it was shown.
Image: NASA – Video: Anglia Ruskin University
