A recently reached exciting and revolutionary milestone in space exploration, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has finally touched down on Mars and recorded the Red Planet’s first-ever audio sounds while doing so. From the moment of parachute inflation, the rover’s camera system captured the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover’s intense ride to Mars’ Jezero Crater. The footage from the high-definition cameras aboard the spacecraft starts 7 miles above the surface – showing the supersonic deployment of the most massive parachute ever sent to another world – and ends with the rover’s touchdown in the crater.
A microphone attached to the rover, unfortunately, did not collect any usable data during the descent. Still, the recording device survived the dangerous conditions of the descent to the surface and successfully obtained sounds from Jezero Crater, processed on Feb. 20. About 10 seconds into the 60-second recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical sounds of the rover’s tracks operating on the surface of the distant planet.
The main objective of the Perseverance Rover’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate to pave the way to explore the Red Planet. This will also be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, which is the layer of unconsolidated rocky material covering bedrock. Future NASA missions would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for an in-depth analysis, with ESA’s help, the European Space Agency. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes a separate branch of Artemis missions to the Moon. These missions are also to help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
With all of this speculation about prior life on Mars and now the new Rover landing, humankind has taken another step forward into the realm of space exploration. Who knows, maybe this landing will prove to unearth information essential to the space race’s future.