This unusual (for us at least) atmosphere is what gives the Red Planet its unusual acoustic properties, the Nature paper explains. Today, Mars is encased in a tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere less than one percent the pressure of Earth’s at sea level. But thanks to the force of solar winds buffeting the planet, most of that protective atmosphere is gone now. Once, the Red Planet’s old atmosphere allowed liquid water to pool on the surface of the planet - potentially sustaining life on the surface. Long ago, Mars lost most of its atmosphere. “I expect many discoveries to come,” he adds. Maurice is referring specifically to the Perseverance rover’s SuperCam, which has a microphone built into it. “It’s a new sense of investigation we’ve never used before on Mars,” says Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study, in a statement. The finding has major implications for any future human endeavor to Mars.
Now, new research published in Nature on Friday reveals a weird quirk of Mars that has been hidden from us all along: The Red Planet has not one, but two speeds of sound. But it also brought something else - the first microphone to function and record on the Red Planet. When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021, it brought with it a suite of instruments, including the typical cameras and the less typical lasers.
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