Snap! Not Whoosh! The super function of Perseverance's super camera

'Crack!' Not 'Whoosh!': Perseverance records first laser sound on Mars

Perseverance continues to achieve milestones on the Red Planet

The sound detections on Mars have been growing, and now lasers have been added.

NASA's Perseverance mission team members said the rover has begun using its rock-analysis instrument, the SuperCam, which is equipped with a microphone to record the faint sounds of wind on Mars and the not-so-faint snaps made by lasers hitting rocks.

"These recordings not only show that our microphones are working well, but also that we have a high-quality signal for science," said SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Hautes Études en Aeronautiques et Astronautics in Toulouse, during a webcast. "Our entire team is very excited about the science that can be done with the data recorded by these microphones."

This image shows a close-up of a target rock called "Máaz" (Máaz is Navajo for Mars). The image was taken by the SuperCam remote micro-imager of the Perseverance Mars rover on March 2, 2021. (Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS)

The car-sized rover is part of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will land in the Jezero Crater on Mars. Billions of years ago, a deep lake and a river delta existed in the Jezero Crater. The rover's mission is to detect signs of ancient life in the 28-mile (45-kilometer) wide area around the Jezero Crater and collect dozens of samples to bring back to Earth.

The SuperCam, located on the rover's head-shaped mast, is one of seven scientific instruments the rover is using to complete its mission. Its laser can hit a target up to 23 feet (7 meters) away, and its camera and spectrometer can determine the composition of the rock mist vaporized by the laser.

According to Murdoch and her colleagues, that vaporization has already begun. The SuperCam fired its laser at a target rock called Máaz, the Navajo word for Mars. (The part of Jezero Crater that Perseverance has been exploring is called Canyon de Chelly by the team, after the Navajo Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona.)

The SuperCam operation allowed the team to determine that the Máaz rock contains basalt, a common volcanic rock on Mars and Earth. But it is not clear whether the Máaz rock is basalt itself, said Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory (a Department of Energy laboratory in New Mexico) and the SuperCam's principal investigator.

Another possibility is that the Máaz rocks "are a type of sedimentary rock that accumulated from volcanic particles that were washed down to Lake Jezero," Wiens said in today's update.

The equipment team announced today that in the first few days of Perseverance's arrival on Mars, the supercamera's microphone recorded the sound of the Martian wind, and also captured countless rapid clicks of the Maaz rock operation - shock waves generated by the release of heat and vibration during the vaporization of the rock.

Such audio will be extremely useful to the SuperCam team, Murdoch said. For example, the details of the clicks will reveal the hardness of each target rock, information that can’t be learned from compositional analysis alone. (Chalk and marble have the same chemical makeup, Murdoch also pointed out.)

The supercam's recordings will also help the Perseverance team keep a close eye on the rover and its subsystems, which will allow researchers to better understand Mars' thin atmosphere, which is mostly composed of carbon dioxide, Murdoch said.

Perseverance is also equipped with another microphone, which is fixed to its "entry, descent, and landing" (EDL) camera system. This EDL microphone did not record during the "seven terrifying minutes" when the rover landed on Mars, but it captured some sounds on the surface of Mars.

Both microphones will be the first to record real sound on Mars, and at certain times they will work together; scientists on the Mars mission team have also discussed the possibility of having them operate simultaneously to capture stereo sound on Mars.

Perseverance has not yet officially started its scientific research work. Its first major task is to find a suitable airport for its 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter "Ingenuity" so that it can carry out flight technology verification.

Perseverance will attempt to record Ingenuity’s flight over Mars, and that could even be a fancy multimedia display: It’s possible that one or both of the supercamera’s microphones could pick up the sound of Ingenuity’s rotors whirring through the thin Martian atmosphere, mission scientists said.

BY:Mike Wall

FY: Jiandibai

If there is any infringement of related content, please contact the author to delete it after the work is published.

Please obtain authorization for reprinting, and pay attention to maintaining integrity and indicating the source