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The use of tiny microphones on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has proven incredibly beneficial to both engineers and scientists. The sensors can identify wind gusts and even hear the staccato popping sounds made of laser pulses made by the rover's instruments. Similarly, the swirling blades of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter have been picked up by these microphones, as has the pumping rhythm of MOXIE, an oxygen-making experiment aboard Perseverance.
Based on the valuable scientific contributions these instruments have made aboard Perseverance as it rolls about within Jezero Crater, it's time to turn up the volume on microphones for extra-planetary exploration.
Following its landing in February 2021, NASA's Mars Perseverance rover is the first mission to the Red Planet that has been able to return acoustic data from the surface in the audible range. The SuperCam microphone has recorded wind and turbulence noise and various equipment operations. It has also made it feasible to create on-the-spot analyses of how sound waves behave in the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Mars atmosphere.
There is now a "Perseverance playlist" featuring hours of Martian sounds, said researchers Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Baptiste Chide of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Space and Planetary Exploration Team.
Lorenz and fellow researchers also note that NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft lander mission to Saturn's icy moon Titan, presently in development, could carry one or more microphones which may gauge rotor/motor operation and perhaps also detect wind noise or other environmental sounds.
Edited by : www.linkedin.com/in/priyanka-v23
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