A few months ago, we were able to hear the sounds of Mars thanks to NASA’s InSight. Now, we can hear what Ganymede, the moon of Jupiter, sounds like. The 50-second audio track was generated from data captured during Juno’s flyby on June 7 where they were able to capture the closest images of the icy moon’s surface and even create a spectacular flyby video from Ganymede. to Jupiter.
The recording, made with the Waves instrument that tunes into electrical and magnetic radio waves originating in the magnetosphere , consists of a strange series of beeps at different frequencies from Ganymede, the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field, and the moon. largest in the solar system, it is even larger than Mercury or the dwarf planet Pluto.
Juno recorded the electrical and magnetic radio waves produced in Jupiter’s magnetosphere and its interaction with Ganymede . Subsequently, NASA scientists changed the signals to a frequency that humans can hear. This audio was featured at the 2021 American Geophysical Union fall meeting.
“This soundtrack is wild enough to make you feel like you’re riding as Juno sails alongside Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the abrupt shift at higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents the entrance to a different region in Ganymede’s magnetosphere.”
This unusual audio, which looks like it was straight out of an old science fiction movie (sounds like the wind blowing along with some robot-like beeps), is currently being investigated. In it, experts hope to find information about the complex magnetic environment of the Jovian system. And it is that transposing the data to audio frequencies is not done just for fun; it’s a different way of accessing and experimenting with data, which in turn can help capture much more subtle details that might otherwise have been missed.
“It is possible that the change in frequency shortly after the closest approach is due to the passage from the night side to the day side of Ganymede,” explained William Kurth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, co-principal investigator of the Waves investigation. .
Aside from its magnetic field, Ganymede has a completely differentiated nucleus and could have a liquid ocean deep within its icy crust that could support life.
At that time, the Juno spacecraft approached only 1,038 kilometers from the surface of Ganymede, moving at 67,000 kilometers per hour relative to the Jovian moon.
Juno’s extended mission will run through June 2025 and is expected to continue to provide astonishing information about the complex, strange and marvelous colossus of our solar system, the planet Jupiter.
Reference: 2021 Congress of the American Geophysical Union
