(upbeat music)
-: On NASA's Perseverance Mars rover.
We have not one but two microphones,
and these microphones are the very first
instruments of their kind ever to go to Mars.
I'm Nina Lanza, and I'm a scientist
at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
-: Hi, I'm Justin Macki.
I'm an imaging scientist
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
One of the microphones is mounted on the mast
and moves around as we point the cameras.
The other microphone is managed to the rover body
and that stays fixed onto the port side of the rover.
Nina: The two microphones that we sent
were commercial off-the-shelf items.
So these are things that you could just buy on the internet,
and we put these on our rover.
-: It gives us a new dimension for which we can explore Mars
and learn about the Martian environment.
Nina: First, we can just learn about the atmosphere
by understanding how sound propagates through it,
but we can also listen to the sounds
of rover analyses on rocks and learn
about rock material properties from that.
And finally, we can also listen to the sounds
the rover makes to understand better
the state of health of our instruments.
-: There's a difference between Mars and Earth sounds.
Sounds on Earth have very rich harmonics.
You can hear multiple frequencies.
It gets a really nice depth to the sound.
On Mars, the atmosphere attenuates
a lot of those higher frequencies,
so you tend to hear the lower frequencies
and it's a much more isolated sound,
a little more muted than the sounds we hear on Earth.
-: We put together a list of some of the sounds
we've recorded on Mars to date, so let's take a listen.
-: This is the sound of wind on Mars.
(wind blowing)
For the first time, we can hear the wind
blowing across the surface of Mars
to go along with all of the images that we've acquired
of dust devils and dust storms over the many years
of exploration on the surface.
-: This is the sound of the rover driving on Mars.
(metal clanking)
This sound might be a little bit weird,
'cause it doesn't sound like a regular driving sound,
but that's because the rover's wheels are made of metal.
So this metal is rolling over rocks and sand
and it makes this really clanky, squeaky sound.
-: Next, we have the SuperCam laser zapping rocks.
(laser zapping)
We've taken a lot of pictures of rocks
that have been zapped by the SuperCam,
with little marks in the rocks,
and for the first time we can hear these laser shots.
-: When it zaps the rock, it actually makes a sound.
We can listen to that sound and learn something
about the properties of the rock that we're analyzing.
This is one of my absolute favorite sounds.
This is the sound of a helicopter flying on Mars.
(helicopter rumbling faintly)
We used this sound to actually understand the propagation
of sound in general through the Martian atmosphere,
and it turns out that we were totally wrong with our models.
The Martian atmosphere can propagate sound
a lot further than we thought it could.
We've all seen these beautiful images
that we get from Mars,
but having sound to be able to add to those images,
it makes me feel like I'm almost right there on the surface.
(upbeat music)