NASA’s investigations of the speed of sound on Mars continue to give us a whole new dimension in exploring the Red Planet. The cooler and thinner atmosphere of Mars, which is mostly carbon dioxide, gives rise to fascinating effects, as we can hear in the recordings exhibited at the 182nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America , in which the Co-author of the original study, Baptiste Chide of Los Alamos National Laboratory, explained that the first year of sounds recorded by Perseverance was reduced to just five hours.
Do you want to listen to any of these recordings? Click here.
As you have seen in the recordings of Martian sounds, Mars is very quiet. The planet’s atmosphere, compared to Earth’s, produces sounds about 20 decibels lower than on our planet, and most naturally occurring sounds come from the wind. (Also, carbon dioxide tends to attenuate high-pitched sounds with distance.)
“It’s so quiet, at one point we thought the mic was broken !” Chide commented in a press release.
But there is more. How would our voice sound on the red planet?
A round of interstellar karaoke? The US space agency has also uploaded a tool that allows earthlings to simulate how our voices would sound on the red planet from inside and from the comfort and safety of our homes.
To use it, simply go to the Sounds from Mars section on the NASA website, navigate to the “You on Mars” tab, then click and hold the button to record your greeting into the device’s microphone. If you want to immortalize the moment, you can download the audio file to hear what your voice sounds like on Mars.
“If you were standing on Mars, you would hear a quieter, more muffled version of what you would hear on Earth, and you would wait a bit longer to hear it,” NASA wrote. “Some sounds we are used to on Earth, like whistles, bells or birdsong, would be almost inaudible on Mars.”
This discrepancy is due, as we noted earlier, to the fact that the atmosphere on Mars is “totally different” from Earth’s, which affects how we perceive sound.
The entire sound playlist is on the NASA website.
Referencia: ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA acousticalsociety.org/asa-meetings/
