NASA shares whirring sound detected by Perseverance rover as it hurtles through space

NASA has a little treat for all the space buffs out there.

NASA has released an audio track of the sounds being picked up by the Perseverance Rover’s built-in microphone as it hurtles through interplanetary space towards Mars. Perseverance Rover, which is the first spacecraft to be rigged with an audio device, is aiming to land in Mars's Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. NASA shared the 60-second audio file, collected during an in-flight checkout of the camera and microphone system, on SoundCloud.

 

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How NASA captured sound in vacuum of space?

The American space agency had collected the file on October 19 after engineers on Earth turned on the mic to check if the system is functioning properly. NASA said that the whirring sound is from the rover's heat rejection fluid pump. Sound doesn't travel in the vacuum of space, but NASA managed to capture the whirring as it travelled through the solid object as mechanical vibrations.

(Image shows EDL microphone on Perseverance rover) 

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"With apologies to the person who came up with the slogan for 'Alien,' I guess you could say that in space no one may be able to hear you scream, but they can hear your heat rejection fluid pump. The microphone we included to hear what it's like to land on Mars was actually able to pick up Perseverance's thermal system operating in the vacuum of space through mechanical vibration," said Dave Gruel, lead engineer for Mars 2020's EDL Camera and Microphone subsystem. 

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The Perseverance rover, which is traveling with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, will touch down at Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18. The rover, launched in July 2020, will continue to conduct experiments and collect samples for 1 Martian year, which would be over 600 days on Earth. 

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(Image Credit: NASA)