NASA’s Perseverance hack captured the sound of the dust devil on Mars

By good fortune, the Mars Wanderer Perseverant captured the first ever sound of the Martian dust devil.

NASA saw a pirate dust storm. But when he was pulling this one into persistence, the pirate’s microphone fell into the opposite case. Primitive data of its kind include the sounds of dust grains either depicting microphones or transmitted to microchips through a pirate structure, the researchers report on December 13. Nature Communications.

Because the pirate’s microphone is sometimes turned on, the team estimates that such events, when they do occur, can only be detected about 0.5 percent of the time.

Wind speeds in the dust devil’s walls reached nearly 40 kilometers per hour, planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch of the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, and colleagues report. As in previous hurricanes detected by other instruments, this late-hand dust devil made a slight drop in atmospheric pressure and rose in temperature, as seen by the pirate on September 27, 2021. It was 25 meters in diameter, at least 118 meters high. and he was traveling at about 20 kilometers per hour.

The big surprise, Murdoch says, is the huge amount of dust in the air in the calm center of the storm as well as in the strong winds that formed its walls. Data from this event, as well as from other storms measured by prying instruments, will help researchers better understand how dust is lifted off the surface of Mars.SN: 10/24/06). As yet, Murdoch says, the mystery of planetary science remains (SN: 7/14/20).