Sounds of mars12/5/2023 “To actually observe is not simple it requires careful planning and also good luck,” study co-author Naomi Murdoch, a planetary scientist at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space who helped design and build Perseverance’s microphone, tells Vice’s Becky Ferreira. If scientists had scheduled the microphone recording for even a few seconds later, they may have missed out on the dust devil entirely. Those scheduled observations are timed to align with periods when dust devils are most likely to sweep by, but that still leaves a lot to chance. Perseverance’s microphone is turned on just eight times a month, and each sound recording lasts only 167 seconds, reports CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Still, scientists got lucky with the new recording. Since InSight arrived on Mars in November 2018, it hasn’t imaged any dust devils. The crater regularly experiences dust devils, unlike Elysium Planitia, the landing site of NASA's InSight lander. Perseverance is situated within Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide site located just north of the planet’s equator. Together, data from these observations suggest the dust devil measured 387 feet tall and 82 feet wide, and traveled at a speed of roughly 11 miles per hour. In addition to recording the sound with its so-called SuperCam microphone, Perseverance also observed the dust devil with its navigation camera and several sensors in its Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer instrument. Even so, scientists were able to glean plenty of information from the swirl of wind and dust.
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