Listen to the Sounds of NASA’s Perseverance Rover Driving on Mars
March 18, 2021 at 10:22PM You wouldn’t think sound could travel very well on Mars—what with the planet’s bare wisp of an atmosphere, which is just 1% the thickness of ours. Yet if you could stand without a spacesuit on the Martian surface (not advised) you’d actually hear plenty. That fact has already been confirmed by the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on Feb. 18 and, using a microphone attached to a mast that holds a camera, has picked up sounds of the stirring of the wind and the ticking of its on-board laser as engineers test-fired it. (The laser is used to vaporize bits of rock which the rover can then analyze with its spectrometer.) Now, NASA has used a second microphone to record a much more evocative sound: the turning of wheels and the crunching of gravel as Perseverance rolled its first 27 m (90 ft) on the surface of the Red Planet. The rover moves slowly—so slowly that the little trip took 16 minutes, which makes for fascinating if admittedly labored...