NASA PLAYS ROVER’S RECORDING OF MARS WIND

WASHINGTON: NASA has released the first sound ever recorded on Mars — a faint and crackling recording of a gust of wind captured by the Perseverance rover.

It also released the first video of last week’s landing of the rover, which is on a mission to search for signs of past life on the Red Planet.

A microphone did not work during the rover’s descent to the surface, but it was able to capture audio once it landed.

NASA engineers played the 60-second recording on Monday. “What you hear there, 10 seconds in, is an actual wind gust on the surface of Mars picked up by the microphone and sent back to us here on Earth,” said Dave

Gruel, lead engineer for the camera and microphone system on Perseverance.

The high-definition video clip, lasting three minutes and 25 seconds, shows the deployment of a red-and-white parachute with a 21.5m-wide canopy used to slow the space craft for landing.

It also shows the heat shield dropping away after protecting

Perseverance during its entry into the Martian atmosphere, and the rover’s touchdown in a cloud of dust in the Jezero Crater just north of the Red Planet’s equator.

“This is the first time we’ve ever been able to capture an event like the landing on Mars,” said Michael Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion

Laboratory, which is managing the mission.

“These are really amazing videos,” he said. “We bingewatched them all weekend.”

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said the video was “the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit”.