Perseverance microphones fulfill long Planetary Society campaign to hear sounds from Mars
JULY 23, 2020
by Nancy Atkinson, The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society has long history of trying to send a microphone to Mars. In addition to the missions pictured here, the Society attempted unsuccessfully to get microphones on NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and InSight missions, as well as the European Space Agency’s ill-fated Schiaparelli lander that crashed in 2016. Credit: The Planetary Society
If you could stand on the surface of Mars, what would you hear? While eight missions have returned stunning views from the surface of the Red Planet, none have returned any sound.
That's about to change. NASA's Perseverance rover, which is days away from blasting off on a mission to search for signs of past life and collect samples for future return to Earth, will have not one, but two microphones aboard. One will listen as the rover plummets through the Martian atmosphere for landing, and another will record sounds as the rover does its scientific work in Jezero Crater—an ancient river delta where life may have flourished.
If all goes well, Perseverance's microphones will fulfill the wishes of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan, who wrote a letter to NASA in 1996 urging the space agency to send a microphone to Mars.
"Even if only a few minutes of Martian sounds are recorded from this first experiment, the public interest will be high and the opportunity for scientific exploration real," Sagan wrote.
More:
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-perseverance-microphones-fulfill-planetary-society.html
