Thanks to the powerful microphone that NASA’s Perseverance rover has carried along with it on its way to Mars, we can all now listen to the first audio recording of a so-called ‘dust devil’ from the Red Planet.
Naomi Murdock, a planetary scientist, collaborated with a team of scientists from NASA’s National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space to come to the new findings. The instrument team responsible for the discovery was led by Roger Wiens, who is a professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the College of Science of Purdue University.
Feel free to listen for yourself to the new audio recording:
‘Dust devil’ is the term describing a strong whirlwind that will exist for a relatively short time.
Roger Wiens explains more about the importance of recorded sound by stating, as Phys.org quotes:
We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,
They take readings at regular intervals. The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second. It helps us get a stronger sense of what Mars is like.
Scientists are even confident that they can learn more about the atmosphere and weather present on our neighboring planet due to their recording of Martian dust devils.
Here’s another important statement issued by Wiens, as the same website mentioned above quotes:
The wind is fast—about 25 miles per hour, but about what you would see in a dust devil on Earth. The difference is that the air pressure on Mars is so much lower that the winds, while just as fast, push with about 1% of the pressure the same speed of wind would have back on Earth. It’s not a powerful wind, but clearly enough to loft particles of grit into the air to make a dust devil.
The rusty iron present in the soil of Mars causes the planet to look red.
