The Perseverance rover recorded the wind and other sounds of Mars. Scientists have found that they are more diverse than one might have hoped. Acoustic conditions on the planet vary depending on the time of year.
Quiet sounds of Mars
Since the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, its two microphones have recorded a lot of sounds. Sound is atmospheric vibrations, so they can be used to judge the state of the planet’s gas envelope. And recently, scientists have been able to draw interesting conclusions from it.
From a year of recordings of Martian sounds, scientists have made a five-hour playlist. It turned out that most of the time the red planet is quiet. Researchers have long suspected that it is always quiet there. But it turned out that the sounds on Mars are 20 decibels quieter than on Earth with the same sources. This means that the sound of a stone falling there is about 100 times quieter than ours.
However, there are still sounds on Mars. And they are very diverse. Listening to them, scientists were able to determine the speed of spread of vibrations in the atmosphere of the planet. It turned out that high-frequency waves spread much faster than low-frequency ones.
Acoustics on Mars depends on the season
The atmosphere of Mars is extremely thin. Most of it consists of carbon dioxide. When winter comes in some hemisphere of Mars, a cap of carbon dioxide ice begins to grow at the pole. And the material for it is the gas of the atmosphere.
So much carbon dioxide is extracted from it that the density changes. And this leads to other conditions for the spread of vibrations. Thus, Mars is the only planet in the Solar System on which sound vibrations change depending on the season without the participation of living beings.
According to phys.org
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