Music As We Know it Can't Exist the Same Way on Mars

Different planet, different physics

Hiya!

I don’t think I need to tell you how integral music is to us as a species, or how transformative. Even if you don’t think you have a musical bone in your body and have a tendency to sing off-key (like me), music still affects you. It moves us, heals us, and makes us shake our groove thangs like there’s no tomorrow.

It’s strange to imagine a world in which music, as we know it, changes into something almost unrecognizable. But that’s exactly what NASA experts discovered about the way sound behaves on Mars.

How it Happened

NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars in February of 2021. About the size of a car (but lighter), Perseverance is fully equipped to explore the surface of Mars. Its mission is to collect rock samples from areas of interest and test the atmosphere to see if it’s possible to produce oxygen there. The rover also has two microphones to record and report any sounds — one is located on its chassis (near the rear left tire), and one on its SuperCam (its “head”).

So far, what we’ve learned about Mars is that it’s eerily silent. Much of the recordings from Perseverance are nothing more than Martian winds. Of course, given there’s no life on the surface to make noise and that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere, we’d expect it to be quiet there.

But recently, Perseverance heard and recorded the whirring noise of a small Ingenuity helicopter taking off. The rover also captured the pings from its Gaseous Dust Removal Tool, a tool used to wipe the dust and shavings off core samples after Perseverance examines them.

These sounds would be meaningless on Earth and probably be drowned out by any number of other noises. But they’re invaluable for the scientists analyzing them because now experts know exactly how far away the sounds were when emitted and when they happened. This information allowed them to calculate how fast the sounds traveled to reach the rover’s mics.

After a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in New Mexico, analyzed the results, everyone was stunned. The researchers were so surprised, they actually thought something was wrong or broken at first. But everything was working as it should be. It was our presumptions that were wrong.

The researchers recently published their findings in Nature on April 1, 2022, showing the noise from the laser reached the microphones far faster than the whir of the helicopter the calculations predicted. As in, sound was traveling at two different speeds — a phenomenon never witnessed anywhere else before.