“It takes some luck to catch a passing dust devil,” NASA said.
Scientists have revealed audio of dust devils on Mars recorded by NASA’s Perseverance rover. It lasts about 10 seconds and involves rumbling gusts of up to 25 mph as well as hundreds of dust particles slamming against the Perseverance rover. According to the researchers, it sounds surprisingly similar to dust devils on Earth, though quieter on Mars due to the thinner atmosphere, which produces more muffled sounds and less gusty wind. Dust devils, or dust vortices, are common on the Red Planet and are part of weather patterns.
The rover landed on Mars in February 2021 and has a working microphone attached. Since then, the device has been put to good use. The microphone is a component of SuperCam, a suite of recording instruments on the rover.
The rover’s left navigation camera was on, along with Perseverance’s weather sensors that measure wind, pressure, temperature and dust, the space agency reported when Supercam’s microphone recorded the dust devil. “This allowed scientists to combine sound, image and atmospheric data. The unique combination of this data with atmospheric modeling allowed researchers to estimate the dust devil’s dimensions: 82 feet (25 m) wide, at least Come is 387 feet (118) meters) long, and is moving at about 12 mph (19 kph),” NASA said in a press release.
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“With this dust-devil recording, we can actually hear and count the particles impacting the rover,” said Naomi Murdoch, planetary scientist at the Institut Supérieure de l’Aeronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO) at the University of Toulouse are scientists. France, told space.com, The recording includes a total of 308 impacts on the rover from dust particles carried by the dust devil’s winds.
“It takes some luck to catch a passing dust devil,” NASA said. “Scientists can’t predict when they’ll pass, so rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity regularly monitor for them in all directions. When scientists see them more often at a certain time of day, or coming from a certain direction , then they use that information to focus their monitoring to try to catch the dust devil,” he continued.
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