- Soar through the ‘Labyrinth of Night’ — a Martian canyon the size of Italy — in thrilling new satellite video Livescience.com
- See Mars’ Grand Canyon, The Labyrinth Of Night Giant Freakin Robot
- Fly across Mars’ ‘Labyrinth of Night’: Incredible video reveals what it would be like to soar over the surface Daily Mail
- Mars probe captures stunning ‘bird’s eye’ footage flying over Martian ‘maze’ and reveals ‘ancient secret’… The US Sun
- Amazing Flyover Reveals What Soaring Across Mars Would Look Like ScienceAlert
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes Mars Sample Depot – Captures Amazing Variety of Martian Geology
Ten sample tubes, capturing an amazing variety of Martian geology, have been deposited on
Throughout its science campaigns, the rover has been taking a pair of samples from rocks the mission team deems scientifically significant. One sample from each pair taken so far now sits in the carefully arranged depot in the “Three Forks” region of Jezero Crater. The depot samples will serve as a backup set while the other half remain inside Perseverance, which would be the primary means to convey samples to a Sample Retrieval Lander as part of the campaign.
Mission scientists believe the igneous and sedimentary rock cores provide an excellent cross-section of the geologic processes that took place in Jezero shortly after the crater’s formation almost 4 billion years ago. The rover also deposited an atmospheric sample and what’s called a “witness” tube, which is used to determine if samples being collected might be contaminated with materials that traveled with the rover from Earth.
The titanium tubes were deposited on the surface in an intricate zigzag pattern, with each sample about 15 to 50 feet (5 to 15 meters) apart from one another to ensure they could be safely recovered. Adding time to the depot-creation process, the team needed to precisely map the location of each 7-inch-long (18.6-centimeter-long) tube and glove (adapter) combination so that the samples could be found even if covered with dust. The depot is on flat ground near the base of the raised, fan-shaped ancient river delta that formed long ago when a river flowed into a lake there.
“With the Three Forks depot in our rearview mirror, Perseverance is now headed up the delta,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at
Next Science Campaign
Passing the Rocky Top outcrop represents the end of the rover’s Delta Front Campaign and the beginning of the rover’s Delta Top Campaign because of the geologic transition that takes place at that level.
“We found that from the base of the delta up to the level where Rocky Top is located, the rocks appear to have been deposited in a lake environment,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech. “And those just above Rocky Top appear to have been created in or at the end of a Martian river flowing into the lake. As we ascend the delta into a river setting, we expect to move into rocks that are composed of larger grains – from sand to large boulders. Those materials likely originated in rocks outside of Jezero, eroded and then washed into the crater.”
One of the first stops the rover will make during the new science campaign is at a location the science team calls the “Curvilinear Unit.” Essentially a Martian sandbar, the unit is made of sediment that eons ago was deposited in a bend in one of Jezero’s inflowing river channels. The science team believes the Curvilinear Unit will be an excellent location to hunt for intriguing outcrops of sandstone and perhaps mudstone, and to get a glimpse at the geological processes beyond the walls of Jezero Crater.
More About the Mission
One of the key objectives for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will analyze the planet’s geology and past climate, lay the foundation for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to gather Martian rock and soil samples.
Later NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
NASA spies Martian rocks that look just like a teddy bear
Scientists studying the surface of Mars recently found a piece of the rocky planet smiling back at them.
In an image shared Jan. 25 by The University of Arizona (UA), what appears to be the face of an enormous Martian teddy bear — complete with two beady eyes, a button nose and an upturned mouth — grins at the camera of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). According to UA, this photo of an uncanny assortment of geological formations was snapped on Dec. 12, 2022, as the MRO cruised roughly 156 miles (251 kilometers) above the Red Planet.
Related: Mars Illusions Photos: The Face on Mars and more!
What’s really going on here? It’s likely just a broken-up hill in the center of an ancient crater, according to a statement posted to UA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera blog (opens in new tab).
“There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head),” the statement reads. “The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater.”
Viewers may see a bear’s face emerge from a collection of dusty rocks and crevices thanks to a phenomenon called pareidolia (opens in new tab), a psychological tendency that leads people to find significance in random images or sounds.
Space provides endless fodder for pareidolia. Take this nebula (a random outflow of gas and dust) that sort of looks like the city-smashing monster Godzilla (opens in new tab), or this Martian rock formation that NASA briefly mistook for the meeping Muppet Beaker (opens in new tab).
Both Beaker and the newly discovered Martian teddy bear were imaged by HiRISE, which is one of six science instruments on board the MRO. HiRISE has been snapping pictures of the Red Planet from orbit since 2006 and, according to UA, is the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet.
More incredible images — and perhaps more cuddly-wuddly faces — surely await just over the Martian horizon.
Originally published on LiveScience.com.
An enormous Martian cloud returns every spring. Scientists now know why.
A cloud longer than California streaks across Mars’ ruddy cheek. It looks as though an impressionist painter loaded his palette knife with white and scraped a line across the canvas as far as the oily paint would travel.
This is not what astrophysicist Jorge Hernández Bernal first saw in 2018 when the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera(Opens in a new window) — affectionately known by the European Space Agency as the Mars webcam(Opens in a new window) — posted a new picture. To the average eye, it was grainy and inscrutable, with the resolution of a standard computer camera circa 20 years ago. But Bernal, who was studying Martian meteorology at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, immediately recognized the shadow as something else: a mysterious weather phenomenon happening on the Red Planet.
It wasn’t until researchers looked at the cloud with better equipment that Mars revealed the cloud in all its sprawling glory. The team dug deeper into photo archives, and discovered it had frequently been there. It was there through the aughts, and it was even there during NASA’s Viking 2 mission(Opens in a new window) in the 1970s.
A low-resolution camera on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express probe first captured the enormous cloud in 2018.
Credit: ESA
The secret had been knowing when to look for it.
“There were people thinking ESA was faking it,” Bernal told Mashable. “It was a bit hard because I was really young at the time [of the discovery], and I was on Twitter trying to speak to people.”
Bernal and his team published their observations in 2020, dubbing it the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud, or AMEC for short. With the cloud spanning 1,100 miles, scientists believe it could be the longest of its kind in the solar system. That work was followed with a second report, recently published(Opens in a new window) in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, revealing just how the volcano makes this extraordinary cloud, alone in an otherwise cloudless southern Mars that time of year.
NASA just inflated its new-age spaceship heat shield for Mars
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“There were people thinking ESA was faking it.”
How scientists discovered Mars’ long cloud
For decades, the icy cloud arrived at sunrise on the western slope of Arsia Mons(Opens in a new window), an extinct volcano. The once lava-spewing ancient mountain is about 270 miles wide at the base and soars 11 miles into the sky. It dwarfs Mauna Loa, the largest Earth volcano, which is about half its height.
The curious case of the gigantic cloud is how it escaped notice for so long. But some of the spacecraft around Mars, such as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are in orbits synchronized with the sun, meaning their cameras can’t take pictures until the afternoon. By that time, the fleeting cloud, which lasts only about three hours in the morning, is already gone.
The Mars Webcam wasn’t originally meant for science. Its purpose was to provide visual confirmation that ESA’s Beagle 2 lander(Opens in a new window) had separated from the Mars Express spacecraft in 2003. In hindsight, the space agency is glad it decided to turn the basic camera back on(Opens in a new window).
A simple camera not even intended for science on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft photographed the enormous cloud.
Credit: ESA
Just as southern Mars experiences spring, the cloud grows and stretches, making a wispy tail like a steam locomotive, over the mountain’s summit. Then, in a matter of hours, the cloud completely fades away in the warm sunlight.
For a young scientist working on his doctorate degree, the natural wonder became a sort of muse. While the realist in him said that recreational space travel is impractical — perhaps even unethical given the world’s climate problems — he couldn’t help but try to draw what the cloud might look like from the ground.
“I keep imagining how it would be for a little civilization to have this huge cloud every year at the same time, like maybe the solstice is something for them like a coat,” he said, smiling. “This is the imagination part.”
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Why Mars’ Arsia Mons makes the gigantic cloud
So what makes this strange, stringy cloud?
For starters, it’s not smoke billowing from a volcanic eruption. Scientists have long-known the volcanoes of the Red Planet(Opens in a new window) are dead. Rather, it’s the so-called “orographic effect:” the physics of air rising over a mountain or volcano.
The researchers ran a high-resolution computer simulation of Arsia Mons’ effect on the atmosphere. Strong winds whip at its foot, making gravity waves. Moist air is then temporarily squeezed and driven up the mountainside. Those drafts blow up to 45 mph, forcing the temperature to plunge by more than 54 degrees Fahrenheit. This allows water to condense and freeze at about 28 miles above the volcano’s peak.
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“I keep imagining how it would be for a little civilization to have this huge cloud every year at the same time, like maybe the solstice is something for them like a coat.”
The enormous Arsia Mons cloud returns year after year in Mars’ springtime for about 80 days.
Credit: ESA
For about five to ten percent of the Martian year, the atmosphere is just right(Opens in a new window) to make the cloud, with the dusty sky helping moisture cling to the air. Too early in the year and the air would be too dry, according to the team’s model. Too late in the year and the climate would be too warm for water condensation.
But though the scientists’ simulation was successful in forming the cloud under Arsia Mons’ unique conditions, it could not replicate the cloud’s lengthy tail. Scientists say that’s the biggest question of the moment — a mystery that could be solved with spectrometers, devices on spacecraft that identify the kinds of particles in a substance. A closer study of the cloud’s water ice might give researchers more clues.
“I would like to see this cloud with my eyes, but I know where my place is,” Bernal said. “Sometimes we think of space like a utopia. I am happy looking at it from [Earth, through] my spacecraft.”
NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Deposits First Sample on Martian Surface for Possible Return to Earth
The sample tube, which is filled with rock, will be one of 10 forming a depot of tubes that the
Perseverance has been taking duplicate samples from rock targets the mission selects. The rover currently has the other 17 samples (including one atmospheric sample) taken so far in its belly. Based on the architecture of the Mars Sample Return campaign, the rover would deliver samples to a future robotic lander. The lander would, in turn, use a robotic arm to place the samples in a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that would blast off to Mars orbit, where another spacecraft would capture the sample container and return it safely to Earth.
The depot will serve as a backup if Perseverance can’t deliver its samples. In that case, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters would be called upon to finish the job.
The first sample to drop was a chalk-size core of igneous rock informally named “Malay,” which was collected on January 31, 2022, in a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater called “South Séítah.” Perseverance’s complex Sampling and Caching System took almost an hour to retrieve the metal tube from inside the rover’s belly, view it one last time with its internal CacheCam, and drop the sample roughly 3 feet (89 centimeters) onto a carefully selected patch of Martian surface.
But the job wasn’t done for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and leads the mission. Once they confirmed the tube had dropped, the team positioned the WATSON camera located at the end of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to peer beneath the rover, checking to be sure that the tube hadn’t rolled into the path of the rover’s wheels.
They also wanted to ensure the tube hadn’t landed in such a way that it was standing on its end (each tube has a flat end piece called a “glove” to make it easier to be picked up by future missions). That occurred less than 5% of the time during testing with Perseverance’s Earthly twin in
Bringing Mars Rock Samples Back to Earth: This short animation features key moments of NASA and ESA’s Mars Sample Return campaign, from landing on Mars and securing the sample tubes to launching them off the surface and ferrying them back to Earth. Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/MSFC
More About the Mission
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover drops 1st sample on Martian surface
Santa came early to Mars this year.
NASA’s Perseverance mission dropped its first cache of precious rock samples on the sands of Mars, leaving behind a record of material that a future mission could bring back to Earth. It’s a key moment in the search for life on Mars, NASA officials said in a statement on Wednesday (Dec. 21).
The rover’s contribution to seeking “ancient microbial life” in an old river delta, as NASA’s Jet Propulsion said in an update (opens in new tab), will include 10 titanium tubes deposited at this location, nicknamed “Three Forks.”
Sometime in the 2030s, if schedules hold, either Perseverance or two helicopters (similar to the currently flying Ingenuity Mars helicopter that finished its 37th flight days ago) will ferry rocky tubes like this in Jezero Crater to a waiting ship.
Related: Perseverance Mars rover to start caching samples for future return to Earth
This tube is a backup depot, however; Perseverance collects twin samples at each location and its mission calls for it to do the delivery itself, using the set of caches inside the rover. But if necessary, the helicopters could be called upon to pick up the backup tubes left on the Martian surface.
However the tubes get delivered, a spacecraft will launch them to space and hand the samples off to a waiting orbiter to return the Martian samples to Earth. Aside from a few meteorites carved off of Mars that fell onto our planet, the historic shipment will represent the first time Red Planet rocks have made it to Earth.
One of the key ingredients of life appears abundant on Mars, or at least it was in ancient times: Water. Huge canyons, vast icebergs and potential underwater reservoirs suggest Mars was rich with water in the ancient past, despite the planet’s dried-up and dusty appearance today.
But whether there was enough to support life requires “ground truth,” which is where Perseverance comes in. A rover can only carry so many instruments with it, however; sending the samples back to Earth will allow entire laboratories the chance to review the Martian bits for signatures of ancient life.
The first sample to hit the regolith is roughly the size of a piece of chalk, collected from an igneous rock nicknamed “Malay” on Jan. 31 in a region called “South Séítah.” South Séítah is itself significant; scientists announced weeks before taking the sample that they had found organics, a possible ingredient of life, in the same area.
The car-sized Perseverance took about an hour to spit out the tube from its belly, where the sampling and caching system resides. The tube fell three feet (89 centimeters) to a flat spot of the Martian surface as planned, and engineers on Earth imaged the area to make sure they don’t accidentally wheel over it as Perseverance drives away.
In photos: 12 amazing pictures from the Perseverance rover’s 1st year on Mars
The pictures came back showing the tube was well out of the way and flat, but NASA did have a contingency plan in place in case the tube ended up upright in the sand. “The mission has written a series of commands for Perseverance to carefully knock the tube over with part of the turret at the end of its robotic arm,” agency officials wrote.
Engineers tested the tube-flattening procedure with a Perseverance-like rover inside the “Mars yard,” an adapted sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California where machines are tested in conditions similar to the Red Planet. Upright deposits happened about five percent of the time in these simulations, which is why the mission has backup.
The milestone drop is happening just weeks before the end of Perseverance’s prime mission on Jan. 6, 2023; the mission will notch two Earth years on the Martian surface on Feb. 18. The rover will continue roving via a mission extension, based on its science publications and contributions like this to the sample return.
“It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission,” Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL, said in the same statement.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
After a long struggle with Martian dust, NASA’s InSight probe has gone quiet
NASA’s InSight lander has probably phoned home for the last time from the planet Mars.
The space agency said the spacecraft did not respond to communications from Earth on Sunday, December 18. The lack of communications came as the lander’s power-generating capacity has been declining in recent months due to the accumulation of Martian dust on its solar panels. NASA said that it is “assumed” that InSight has reached the end of its operations but that it will continue to try to contact the lander in the coming days.
Also on Monday, the InSight Twitter account shared a photo with a message saying this was probably the last photo it was sending from Mars.
My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me. pic.twitter.com/wkYKww15kQ
— NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) December 19, 2022
InSight landed on Mars in 2018 with the aim of studying seismic activity. It has been a success—InSight has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a relatively powerful magnitude 4.7 quake on May 4. This was the largest marsquake detected to date and at the upper limit of what scientists hoped to observe. This seismic activity has allowed scientists to tease out details about the inner structure of the red planet.
However, during its operations on Mars, dust has steadily accumulated on the stationary lander’s solar panels. By May 2022, the panels were producing just 500 watt-hours of energy, a tenth of what they could generate upon landing on Mars. Since then, its power levels have steadily declined to the point where InSight does not have the juice necessary to radio back to Earth.
Saying goodbye to spacecraft such as InSight is always difficult. Humans send these robotic probes out into the frigid depths of the Solar System to increase our scientific understanding. Over that time, they shine brightly for a few years. And then, they’re gone.
Look, I’m not sure why water is running down from your eyes. But speaking for myself, that’s Martian dust causing tears to come out of my eyes. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
How researchers recorded the sounds of a Martian dust devil for the first time
On September 27th, 2021, a dust devil whirled past the Perseverance rover on Mars. The rover not only caught the dust devil on its cameras and with its weather sensors but also picked up the faint, eerie sounds of the dust devil on its microphone, the first instrument of its kind to record sounds on Mars.
“We were convinced that the microphone was going to give us a whole load of new observations of atmospheric features on Mars that we hadn’t been able to see before,” Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of a Nature Communications paper about the research, said to The Verge. “And we haven’t been disappointed!”
Rovers have been exploring Mars for decades with cameras, spectrographs, and weather sensors, giving us a better picture than ever before of what the environment on the Red Planet is like. Now, sounds are being added to the list. This combination of data is allowing researchers to understand more about these dusty phenomena and the impacts they could have on future robotic and crewed missions.
Dust devils arise due to atmospheric conditions that are common on Mars. “You have to have a really large temperature gradient between the ground and the air,” Murdoch explained. “So the ground gets really warm, and this heats up the air, which then makes the air start to rise. And as the air starts to rise, things start to rotate, and that’s when you get this whirlwind-like motion.”
This process happens here on Earth, too, but what is notable about Martian dust devils is just how large they can get. The dust devil recently detected by Perseverance was 25 meters wide and 118 meters tall (82 feet by 387 feet), putting it squarely in the average zone in terms of size for Martian dust storms. But they can grow much bigger, too, as dust on Mars can be whipped up in huge global dust storms.
“One of the big problems we have right now is that we can’t predict dust storms very well,” Murdoch said. And that has implications for everything — from trying to land spacecraft safely on Mars to trying to keep dust off vital solar panels to keep robotic missions going. Current models especially struggle to predict the large global dust storms, and that seems to be because it’s hard to model the forces that are lifting dust up off the planet’s surface.
Researchers know that forces like wind shear and dust devils can lift dust off the surface, but there are plenty of open questions about exactly how this happens. One particularly odd finding is that while dust devils are common in the Jezero Crater where Perseverance is located, they are notably rare in Elysium Planitia, the area in which the InSight lander is located, and it’s not clear why.
That’s where the microphone comes in. “What our microphone is sensitive to is specifically the wind speed. So when we see wind gusts, we see a large increase in the sound amplitude on the microphone, just like when you’re talking on the phone and it’s windy,” Murdoch explained. “We’re using that background noise to study the wind.”
With so many scientific instruments on Perseverance needing operating time, the windows available for microphone recordings are each just a few minutes long. To maximize their chances of detecting a dust devil during these short periods, the microphone team timed those windows for periods in the afternoon, when dust devils are most active. Each window is only a few minutes long, and they had just eight windows per month — so it was a combination of careful planning and a healthy dose of luck that this recent dust devil was captured.
As well as picking up data about the wind conditions, the microphone also detected the sound of small impacts: single grains of dust that were striking the area around the microphone and making a detectable ping. By counting each of these impacts, the researchers could see how dense these particles were within the dust devil — a measurement that no other instrument has been able to take and that could help to model how dust devils lift particles from the surface.
This research is just an early example in the burgeoning field of using acoustic data in planetary exploration. For a planet or moon with an atmosphere, acoustic instruments can collect data at a high sampling rate, allowing observations of fast-changing events like wind gusts compared to tools like wind sensors, which operate on timescales of a few seconds.
“Our sampling rate is much higher than all of the regular weather sensors that you’ll find on planetary rovers and planetary landers,” Murdoch said. “With a microphone, it’s a bit like using a microscope. We’re looking at what’s happening at these really short time scales.”
There’s also the human fascination that comes along with hearing the sounds of another planet. NASA’s playlist of Perseverance sounds allows anyone to experience the noises of the Red Planet, from the whistling of the wind to the whirring of the rover itself, all enabled by SuperCam’s microphone.
“Our microphone bandwidth is exactly the same bandwidth as the human ear, so the sounds we’re hearing aren’t adjusted in any way. They’re the sounds that you would hear if you were standing on another planet,” Murdoch said. “And that’s really cool.”
Audio from a Martian dust devil captured for the first time
NASA announced today that the Perseverance rover has captured audio from a Martian dust devil for the first time. But the clip not only treats us to the novelty of hearing an extraterrestrial vortex; it could also help scientists better understand how dust might affect future Mars missions.
The rover’s microphones picked up the dust devil on September 27th, 2021. To the casual ear, it sounds similar to a microphone picking up a wind gust on Earth, but scientists can learn much more. “As the dust devil passed over Perseverance we could actually hear individual impacts of grains on the rover,” Naomi Murdoch, planetary scientist and the author of new report, told The Washington Post. “We could actually count them.”
Dust is a significant factor in planning for Mars missions. It can erode a spacecraft’s heat shields, damage scientific instruments, incapacitate parachutes and smother solar panels.
Scientists estimate the recorded whirlwind measured about 82 feet wide by 387 feet high. (Although that may sound intimidating, this relatively minor storm didn’t damage the rover.) As you can hear below (via Science News), the clip includes a brief pause in the turbulence as the dust devil’s eye passes over the rover.
Perseverance also captured images (also included in the recording) of the approaching storm. Scientists had to coordinate their instruments to boost the odds of recording a storm. The rover only records sound snippets lasting under three minutes and only does so eight times per month. That meant timing them for when dust devils are most likely to hit while pointing its cameras where they’re most likely to approach. In this case, that preparation — and no small degree of luck — paid off.
“I can’t think of a previous case where so much data from so many instruments contributed to characterizing a single dust devil,” said John Edward Moores, a planetary scientist at York University. “Had the [camera] been pointing in a different direction or the microphone observation been scheduled just a few seconds later, key pieces of the story would be missing. Sometimes it helps to be lucky in science!”
The roughly 10-ft.-long Perseverance rover launched on July 30th, 2020 and touched Martian soil on February 18th, 2021. NASA uses the vehicle to explore the Jezero crater and search for signs of ancient microbial life as part of the Mars 2020 mission.
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Listen to Martian weather, recorded by Perseverance rover
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A towering whirlwind of dust passed right over the Perseverance rover as it explored the site of an ancient lake on Mars – and the rover recorded the first sounds of this Martian dust devil using its microphone.
Dust devils, or dust whirlwinds, are common on Mars, and they’re part of the weather patterns on the red planet.
Other missions have gathered images, weather data and dust measurements of these events, and the NASA InSight lander even recorded seismic and magnetic signals created by the dust devils. But sound has been the missing element — until now.
When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021, it became the first mission to carry microphones on a journey to the red planet.
The robotic explorer’s SuperCam microphone just happened to be turned on and recording on September 27, 2021, when a dust devil passed directly over the rover, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
During an 11-second clip captured by the microphone, there are two periods of low frequency wind as the leading and trailing walls of the dust devil pass over the rover, said lead study author Dr. Naomi Murdoch, researcher at the University of Toulouse’s Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space.
In between the walls of the whirlwind is a calm period when the rover was in the eye of the vortex, Murdoch said.
Crackling and hissing can be heard during the event, which were determined to be dust grains hitting the rover.
The researchers were able to count the particles in the dust devil as they hit the rover, leading to a completely new type of measurement on the red planet, Murdoch said. It’s the first time an instrument has been able to quantify lofted dust on Mars.
Images and other data sent back by the rover also confirmed what happened. When the researchers pieced all of the elements collected by the rover together, they determined that the dust devil reached more than 387 feet (118 meters) tall and spanned 82 feet (25 meters wide) – about 10 times larger than the rover itself. While this sounds like a massive whirlwind, it’s the average size for Martian dust devils, Murdoch said.
The researchers were surprised to discover that dust accumulated inside the dust devil, rather than just being carried inside the outer walls – possible because the dust devil may still have been in the process of forming as it moved over Perseverance.
Dust devils serve as indicators of turbulence in the atmosphere on Mars and they play an important role in the Martian dust cycle.
Learning more about how dust becomes lofted and moves on the red planet – a key feature of its weather and climate since dust is its main feature – can help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of dust storms.
A planet-encircling dust storm is what ended the Opportunity rover’s 15-year mission in 2018.
“Global dust storms are important for understanding the Martian climate,” Murdoch said. “The acoustic measurements of dust impacts and dust lifting will, therefore, improve our understanding of dust devils and will also help to improve Martian climate models. Understanding dust lifting is also critical for space missions due to the damage that can be caused to hardware.”
Perseverance’s wind sensors have already been damaged due to lofted dust particles likely carried by wind or a dust devil, Murdoch said.
Dust devils have a reputation for being both helpful and harmful on Mars.
The InSight lander’s mission is expected to end this month after spending four years studying quakes and other phenomenon on the red planet. Layers of dust have collected on its solar panels and prevented the spacecraft from collecting enough power to continue operating its instruments.
Dust devils occur frequently in Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed, but they seem to be absent at InSight’s home in the flat plain of Elysium Planitia – and researchers aren’t sure why.
“In the case of InSight, the dust has settled out of the atmosphere onto the solar panels. However, because there are no whirlwinds capable of lifting dust in the region of InSight, the whirlwinds are not able to ‘clean’ the solar panels.”
Other Mars missions have actually benefited from regular cleanings by dust devils, which acted like vacuum cleaners for the dust collected on the solar-powered Spirit and Opportunity rovers and provided them with longer-than-expected lifespans.
The University of Toulouse’s Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space, known as ISAE-SUPAERO, built the microphone that sits on Perseverance. Every month, Murdoch and her team collect eight recordings lasting about 167 seconds each.
“We estimate that a single microphone observation in the mid-day period (the time of day when there is the most dust devil activity) has only a 1 in 200 chance of recording a dust devil like the one we encountered,” Murdoch said. “We definitely got lucky, but we also carefully targeted the instrument observations to increase the chances of success.”
More microphone recordings could capture additional dust devils, and Murdoch’s team is using acoustic recordings to measure atmospheric turbulence to determine its range on Mars.
The SuperCam microphone was originally included to listen as instruments on the rover zap rocks to determine their properties, but its acoustic data is also shedding light on the atmospheric science possibilities on the red planet, Murdoch said.
“All of these measurements and analyses highlight just how valuable acoustic data are in planetary exploration. Therefore, in parallel, at ISAE-SUPAERO, we are developing the next generation of acoustic sensors that will be sent to other planetary bodies with an atmosphere in the future,” she said.