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Music As We Know it Can’t Exist on Mars
Different planet, different physics
I don’t think I need to tell you how integral music is to us as a species or how transformative. Music affects you even if you don’t believe you have a musical bone in your body and tend to sing off-key (like me). It moves us, heals us, and makes us shake our groove thangs like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s strange to imagine a world in which music, as we know it, morphs into something almost unrecognizable. But that’s exactly what NASA experts discovered about how sound behaves on Mars. As it turns out, even sound is alien on the Red Planet.
How it Happened
NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars in February of 2021. About the size of a car (but lighter), Perseverance is fully equipped to explore the surface of Mars. Its mission is to collect rock samples from areas of interest and test the atmosphere to see if producing oxygen there is possible.
The rover also has two microphones to record and report any sounds — one is located on its chassis (near the rear left tire), and one on its SuperCam (its “head”).
So far, what we’ve learned about Mars is that it’s eerily silent.
Much of the recordings from Perseverance are nothing more than Martian winds. Of…
