Using a laser to strike rocks and a built-in microphone, NASA’s Perseverance rover has measured changes in the speed of sound on Mars due to temperature affecting the atmosphere
Space
9 March 2022
An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover NASA/JPL-Caltech
The speed of sound on Mars has been measured for the first time using microphones on NASA’s Perseverance rover.
Baptiste Chide at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues recorded sounds from the Mars’s Jezero crater last year, such as a laser striking rocks, which generates a shockwave. They also captured the frequency shift of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades as it moved through the Martian atmosphere after launching from Perseverance.
The laser and microphone aboard Perseverance were precisely synchronised, …