For the first time in human history, the sound of the wind on Mars has been captured by NASA’s InSight mission, which landed on the red planet a few days ago.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has released several audio files of the alien wind , showing how InSight picked up the low-frequency rumors during its first week of operations.
The wind is estimated to blow between 10 and 15 miles per hour, heading northwest to southeast, according to the Insight record. These are the first sounds from Mars that are detectable by human ears, according to scientists.
“Capturing this audio was an unplanned gift,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA’s Pasadena, California, laboratory. “But one of the things we do on this mission is measuring the motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves .”
It’s like “sitting on the porch on a windy summer afternoon … in a sense, that’s what it would sound like if you were sitting on the InSight lander on Mars,” the experts explained at the press conference.
Scientists involved in the project said the sound has an otherworldly quality . Thomas Pike, from Imperial College London, UK, stated that the rumor was “quite different from anything we have experienced on Earth, and I think it just gives us another way of thinking about how far we are receiving these signals” .
The noise we hear corresponds to the wind blowing against the InSight solar panels and the resulting vibration from the entire spacecraft . The sounds were recorded by an air pressure sensor inside the lander that is part of a weather station, as well as the seismometer on the deck of the spacecraft.
The low frequencies are the result of the very thin density of the air on Mars, which is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, and even more so, since the seismometer itself is designed to detect underground seismic waves that are very below the threshold of human hearing. It is the reason why NASA has had to clean the audio and increase its volume two octaves so that we can perceive it (better if it is listened to with headphones).
The seismometer will move to the Martian surface in the coming weeks. Until then, the team plans to record more wind noise from our neighboring red planet .
The 1976 Viking launchers picked up the spacecraft’s shaking caused by the wind on Mars, but it would be an exaggeration to consider it as a sound, Banerdt said.
InSight landed on Mars on November 26. “We are all still ‘high’ since landing last week … and here we are less than two weeks after landing, and we already have some amazing new science,” said Lori Glaze, Acting Director of Planetary from NASA. science. “It’s cool, it’s fun.”
And this is just the beginning.
This is how the Martian winds sound:
