Sound travels slower at Mars’ surface than Earth’s, and its speed depends on whether that sound has a higher pitch or a lower pitch.
, and while it didn’t work as hoped, it is now turned on occasionally to listen to the rover’s vitals . The other microphone is part of the rover’s SuperCam instrument, a mast-mounted mishmash of cameras and other sensors used to understand the properties of materials on the planet’s surface.
. The microphone on SuperCam captures sounds from those laser shots, which helps researchers learn about the hardness of the target material, says planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch of the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France. The slower speed isn’t surprising. What we hear as sound is actually pressure waves traveling through a medium like air, and the speed of those waves
The SuperCam microphone captures thousands of sound snippets per second. Those sounds are affected by air pressures, so the researchers can use that acoustic data to track detailed changes in air pressures over short timescales, and, in doing so, learn more about the Martian climate. While other Mars rovers have had wind, temperature and pressure sensors, those could sense changes only over longer periods.
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