By Tim Binnall
For the first-time ever, NASA has recorded the sound of a Martian dust devil as the swirling vortex of tiny particles swept over the space agency's Perseverance rover. The historic piece of audio, reportedly captured in September of last year, was unveiled this week in a scientific paper detailing the insights that researchers were able to glean from the incident. In a testament to the tremendous capabilities of Perseverance, the rover not only picked up the audio by way of its microphone, but its instruments also took pictures of the dust devil and measured the temperature and air pressure during the moment that it crossed paths with the whirlwind.
While the audio recording, which can be heard above, may sound not all that different from the wind blowing here on Earth, scientists analyzing the recording were able to detect 308 instances wherein the rover was pelted with tiny pieces of dust that were whipped up in the vortex. Intriguingly, the researchers observed that, unlike the normal composition of a dust devil, this particular whirlwind saw a higher concentration of material in its center rather than at its edges. Speaking to the strangeness of the storm, lead scientist Naomi Murdoch mused that it was "unusual even for Mars" and theorized that its uniqueness may be due to the vortex being "still in its initial phase of formation."
Based on the array of information collected by the rover, the researchers were able to estimate that it was approximately 378 feet tall and with a width of around 82 feet. They also determined that it was traveling at a speed of 17 feet-per-second when it encountered Perseverance. The capturing of the audio turned out to be something of a fortuitous event as the rover had previously detected a whopping 90 dust devils under similar circumstances, but this was the first time that its microphone happened to be activated when the moment occurred as the device is only able to record in 167-second long segments.