Thoughts on the sounds of Mars from NASA’s Mars Perseverance
Thoughts on the sounds of Mars from NASA’s Mars Perseverance
On 23 February 2021, news organizations had headlines such as “NASA's Mars Perseverance rover beams back first sounds ever recorded on another planet”.
We know in detail what many planets sound like, but decent quality data on how they sound is rare. This not only means that movies generate unrealistic soundscapes for, say, Mars, but we miss the opportunity to infer what is happening in an alien world using complementary signals. Acoustic signals can travel around line-of-sight obstacles that block, for example, the view of a camera. They can travel through liquids and solids that are optically opaque. The bandwidth and power requirements, and weight and fragility, of acoustic sensors can often be less than those of video cameras. The previously slow progress in capturing an alien soundscape took a very significant step forward with the successful deployment of NASA's Mars Perseverance.
22-28
Leighton, Timothy
3e5262ce-1d7d-42eb-b013-fcc5c286bbae
2021
Leighton, Timothy
3e5262ce-1d7d-42eb-b013-fcc5c286bbae
Leighton, Timothy
(2021)
Thoughts on the sounds of Mars from NASA’s Mars Perseverance.
Acoustics Bulletin, 45 (3), .
Abstract
On 23 February 2021, news organizations had headlines such as “NASA's Mars Perseverance rover beams back first sounds ever recorded on another planet”.
We know in detail what many planets sound like, but decent quality data on how they sound is rare. This not only means that movies generate unrealistic soundscapes for, say, Mars, but we miss the opportunity to infer what is happening in an alien world using complementary signals. Acoustic signals can travel around line-of-sight obstacles that block, for example, the view of a camera. They can travel through liquids and solids that are optically opaque. The bandwidth and power requirements, and weight and fragility, of acoustic sensors can often be less than those of video cameras. The previously slow progress in capturing an alien soundscape took a very significant step forward with the successful deployment of NASA's Mars Perseverance.
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Accepted/In Press date: 9 April 2021
Published date: 2021
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Local EPrints ID: 448282
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/448282
ISSN: 0308-437X
PURE UUID: 4325f2ee-c435-4ae5-ab5c-319a96751b81
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Date deposited: 19 Apr 2021 16:30
Last modified: 19 Dec 2023 02:34
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