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Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state
by areoform 1y ago
Yes! Mars has enough of an atmosphere for sound to propagate. And sound is incredibly information rich. With sound alone, they're now able to diagnose the state of the rover, extract incredible amounts of information about the martian environment and a bunch of other stuff (see below).
It's kinda like all those clever hacks that use audio to figure out keystrokes.
> the study of sound associated with laser impacts on Martian rocks to better
understand their mechanical properties, the improvement of our knowledge of atmospheric
phenomena at the surface of Mars such as atmospheric turbulence, convective vortices, dust
lifting processes and wind interactions with the rover itself. The microphone also helps our
understanding of the sound signature of the different movements of the rover: operations
of the robotic arm and the mast, driving on the rough surface of Mars, monitoring of the
pumps, etc
https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document https://hal.science/hal-03977124/document
There were some scientists who believed that the recordings would be useless. A waste of payload space. The experiment had to be done to demonstrate, with data, just how versatile audio can be.
There's only one The Jim Green, but we need more Jim Greens in the world.