Scientists have made history by recording the first audio of an extraterrestrial whirlwind on Mars, thanks to the microphone on NASA's Perseverance rover. The study, led by planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch and a team of researchers at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space an
College of Science, leads the instrument team behind the discovery. He is the principal investigator of Perseverance’s SuperCam, a suite of tools that make up the rover’s “head,” including advanced remote-sensing instruments, spectrometers, cameras, and the microphone.
The microphone is not on continuously; it records for about three minutes every couple of days. Getting the whirlwind recording, Wiens said, was lucky, though not necessarily unexpected. In the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed, the team has observed evidence of nearly 100 dust devils – tiny tornadoes of dust and grit – since the rover’s landing. This is the first time the microphone was on when one passed over the rover.
“We could watch the pressure drop, listen to the wind, then have a little bit of silence that is the eye of the tiny storm, and then hear the wind again and watch the pressure rise,” Wiens said. It all happened in a few seconds. “The wind is fast — about 25 miles per hour, but about what you would see in a dust devil on Earth.
“Those rover teams would see a slow decline in power over a number of days to weeks, then a jump. That was when wind cleared off the solar panels,” Wiens said.
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