What does Mars sound like? Rover microphone has recorded the red planet’s dust devils

tech.hindustantimes.com:

A dust devil looks a bit like a tornado, but is weaker and rarely lasts more than about a minute.

It is a twisting column of warmed air scooting across sun-heated ground, made visible by the dust that it lofts upwards. Although usually benign, occasionally dust devils can kill.

Dust devils have been known to appear on Mars since the 1970s. They have been observed both from the ground and from orbit.

The more dust in the Martian atmosphere, the warmer and more agitated it becomes, and this can escalate into a global dust storm.

When the dust settles, it can coat and disable the solar panels that are essential for many of the instruments we've landed on the planet.

There's a lot we don't know about how these devils function. But new research, published this week in Nature Communications, has recorded what dust devils sound like – giving fresh insights into how they operate.

But it also raises questions about how future astronauts would detect and interpret sounds on the red planet.

There has been a vast amount of erosion on Mars since the last rivers and lakes vanished, including at the landing sites of both Nasa's current rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.

Although the erosive power of an individual dust devil is tiny, a billion years worth of dust devils could potentially have worn away kilometres of rock.

There are thus many reasons for wanting to better understand how dust devils function.

And we now know what a Martian dust devil sounds like thanks to the new study led by Naomi Murdoch of Toulouse University in France.

Many passing dust devils have been imaged by cameras on Mars landers and rovers, but Murdoch and her team report a dust devil that luckily passed exactly over the Perseverance rover on September 27, 2021, which