The whoosh of the Martian wind is eerie.
NASA’s recently-landed Perservance rover is the first rover to record sound on Mars, and the space agency released the car-sized robot’s first recordings on Monday.
It’s also the first time Martian sound has been recorded with a real microphone (NASA’s InSight lander previously picked up some brief audio using a weather-monitoring instrument). To hear these new rover recordings, NASA recommends using headphones. At about six seconds into the short clip, you hear a wind gust on Mars, recorded on Feb. 20, 2021.
“We have recorded sounds from the surface of Mars,” David Gruel, the mission’s Entry, Descent, and Landing Camera Suite Lead, said at a press conference on Monday.
Listen below via SoundCloud.
And . If you click on “Download Audio” you can also see the option to hear an unfiltered version of the recording, with the hum of the rover still in the background.
The Perseverance rover is equipped with two microphones, one atop the rover’s mast (which hasn’t been lifted yet) and one on the side of the robot. This first recording came from the microphone on the rover’s side.
In the coming weeks, months, and years, the microphones will record wind, dust storms, and the rover zapping rocks with a laser.
“We think we’ll hear Earth-like sounds on a planet that’s tens of millions of miles away,” Bruce Betts, a planetary scientist at , an organization that promotes the exploration of space, told Mashable last year.
Sounds on Mars, however, are a little different than sounds on Earth. As Mashable previously reported:
Anything recorded on Mars will sound differently than the same noise would on Earth. That’s because the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, and it’s also composed largely of a different gas, carbon dioxide. (Earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen.) A thinner atmosphere means sound has less of a medium to pass through (space and the moon, places with no atmosphere, are soundless). So Martian sounds will be quieter and won’t travel nearly as far as those on Earth. A scream on Earth traveling over a kilometer would .
The mission has just begun. There’s many more extraterrestrial, far-off Martian sounds to come.
“It’s overwhelming, if you will,” said NASA’s Gruel.
