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The use of small microphones on NASA’s Perseverance rover has proven to be incredibly useful for engineers and scientists alike. The sensors can detect wind and even hear
The use of small microphones on NASA’s Perseverance rover has proven to be incredibly useful for engineers and scientists alike. The sensors can detect wind and even hear the staccato sounds created by the laser pulses generated by the rover’s instruments.
Similarly, these microphones detect the buzzing blades of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter and the pumping rhythm of the Mars In situ Oxygen Sourcing Experiment (MOXIE), the oxygen production experiment aboard Perseverance.
Given the valuable scientific contributions these instruments make to Perseverance as it moves through the Jezero Crater, it’s time to turn up the microphones for extraterrestrial research.
Timothy Leighton is professor of ultrasound and underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton in England. It continues to support international efforts to place acoustic sensors on probes destined for Mars and other space destinations.
“The study goes beyond hearing sounds,” Leighton told Space.com. Because these sounds can be analyzed to give researchers information about wind, temperature, chemistry and turbulence on Mars. “You can tune in to a tremendous amount of information by listening to sounds,” Leighton said.
Leighton was focused on raising public interest to get politicians to push for microphones on other worlds.
To this end, Leighton installed an acoustic simulation device at a local planetarium for use in live demonstrations aimed at attracting and inspiring children with science and technology. The software package plays audio simulations that evaluate the sounds created by natural phenomena—thunder, wind, and cold volcano sounds—to accompany the planetarium’s visual presentations and demonstrations of the exploration of Venus, Mars, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
The software package can also alter the speaker’s or listeners’ language to mimic the voices of whatever extraterrestrial world is in question.
“The exercises also explained the science and technology behind making sounds,” Leighton said. said. “But the real big breakthroughs are the science and engineering of Perseverance,” he said, “and my contribution is small compared to that, I’m just trying to get people interested.”
After landing in February 2021, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover became the first mission to the Red Planet to return acoustic data from the surface in the audible range.
The wheeled robot is equipped with two microphones: a SuperCam microphone mounted on top of the rover’s rotating mast, and an entry, descent, and landing microphone mounted on the rover’s body.
The SuperCam microphone recorded wind and turbulence noise and various equipment operations. This also enabled an in situ analysis of how sound waves behave in Mars’ thin, carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere.
Sounds recorded on Mars come from three main sources: the atmosphere (created by turbulence and wind), shock waves produced by the Laser Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument on SuperCam, and hardware-generated artificial sounds such as the rover’s engines turning their wheels. .
For example, MOXIE is heard almost every time the SuperCam microphone is turned on, according to Michael Hecht of MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
“This is located at the top of the mast and is deliberately isolated from the body so that sound is transmitted through the air,” Hecht told Space.com.
Another artificial sound produced by the hardware comes from the high-speed rotating blades of the Ingenuity helicopter. Several Ingenuity flights were close enough for the SuperCam microphone to pick up their acoustic signature.
There is now a “Perseverance playlist” containing hours of Mars sounds, report researchers Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Baptiste Cheed of the Space and Planetary Research Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
At a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers reported that the most striking sound came from Ingenuity helicopter flights.
In a related paper, Lorenz said the data collected by the helicopter is critical to understanding the acoustic environment of Mars. Additionally, these acoustic measurements are a useful diagnostic tool for evaluating the flight performance of a robotic helicopter, which may be suitable to support future sample return operations to Mars.
Lorenz and colleagues also note that NASA’s Dragonfly helicopter mission to Saturn’s icy moon Titan, currently under development, may have one or more microphones that can measure rotor/motor performance and possibly also detect wind noise or other environmental sounds.
To plan missions to other worlds with microphones or other acoustic sensors and to properly design these vehicles, it is useful to predict the nature of the signals they can detect, Leighton said. Such predictions, for example, can determine at an early stage when a planned single-microphone system needs to be replaced by a three-microphone system, he said. Source
Source: Port Altele
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