Listen to the journey of perseverance through deep space

NASA agency Rover perseverance On the way to Mars. A six-month trip to the red planet can get somewhat boring, but fortunately the car-sized robot has found a way to entertain itself in interplanetary space – with a short microphone examination.

A microphone attached to the Tenacity Wagon picked up a 60-second audio file of the space flight, which detected the spacecraft’s sounds as it traveled away from Earth.

Rover perseverance It was launched on July 30th From Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where the rover was attached to the 541 Atlas missile of the United Launch Alliance.

An hour after it flew, Perseverance detached from the rocket and officially began its journey to Mars. Once there, he will look for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

On October 19, the rover’s microphone recorded a minute of sound from space, giving us a small snippet of the time it travels through deep space.

Listen to it here:

The faint humming sound heard in the clip is actually the sound of Perseverance’s heat ejection fluid pump, which helps the robot maintain temperatures so it can still work during the cold nights it will have to spend on Mars.

Sound cannot travel through a vacuum from space, but sound waves can travel through solid objects. This is why the only sound that a microphone picks up is the sound that travels through the rover’s heat pump, where it causes mechanical vibrations.

“With apologies to the person who came up with the ‘Alien’ logo, I think you could say that in space nobody can hear you screaming, but they can hear your fluid pump to reject the heat,” Dave GrowellThe chief engineer of the March 2020 camera and microphone subsystem at March 2020 Corporation at A. statement.

An illustration of the rover persevering on the surface of Mars.NASA

Sonic first – The Perseverance was the first rover with a microphone.

The microphone aims to capture the sounds of perseverance entering, descending, and landing on Mars when the rover’s parachute takes off. If all goes as planned, the landing engines take off, and their wheels finally make contact with the dusty surface.

Thanks to this 60-second audio coil of mechanical buzz, the team behind persistence can now rest assured that the microphone is indeed working.

“As wonderful as it is to capture a little bit of sound in spacecraft operations in flight,” said Gruel, “the audio file has a more important meaning.”

“This means our system is up and running and ready to try and record some of the sounds and anger caused by the Mars landing.”

This is the first time that ground controllers have attempted to hear the robot landed on an alien planet, so they aren’t entirely sure what to expect.

“Getting the sound off the landing is a nice thing, not a necessity,” Gruel said.

The Perseverance should arrive on Mars on February 18, 2021.

The robot will land on Crater Lake, A crater 28 miles wide and 500 meters deep is located in a basin slightly north of the Martian equator. Jezero Crater Island once housed a lake that scientists believe dried up 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

Once it lands, you will persistently start looking for clues to earlier microbial life that may have been present in the lake during the early history of the red planet.

See also  The floods in Western Europe were caused by climate change

The robot will collect rock and soil samples and set them aside on the first ever return mission from another planet. The rock samples will be stored away in tubes at a well-defined location on Mars, and left for return to Earth on a future mission to the Red Planet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *