Imagine having a conversation with your friend on a red gassy planet. What would it be like? The experience might mostly be you and your friend yelling to each other because your teeth are chattering. Or because Mars’s thin atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and doesn’t carry sound as well as the atmosphere here on Earth.
A rover called Perseverance got sound recordings on Mars but what Perseverance recorded weren’t the sounds of events on Mars. They were noises made when it fired a laser at nearby rocks. That zap created a sound wave that looks similar to thunder, but sound like thunder on a much smaller scale.
This data allowed the researchers to measure the speed of sound on Mars — and revealed a surprise. On this planet there’s more than one speed of sound, depending on how well the human can hear it. On Mars, within the range of human hearing, high pitched sounds travel at about 250 meters per second (559 miles per hour). Low-pitched sounds travel slower — about 240 meters per second (537 miles per hour). The low-pitched waves will travel just a few meters before becoming inaudible. While the higher sounds move over even shorter spans.
Of course, there aren’t birds on Mars to make sound — but that’s not why scientists study sound on alien worlds. Measuring the speed of sound can give scientists a precise way to study the atmosphere, says Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Air pressure, temperature, and humidity all affect the speed of sound. So, by measuring changes in the speed of sound over time, Chide says, researchers can learn more about weather. “We can measure temperature in small fractions of time,” he says — even day to day.
Article: https://s3.amazonaws.com/appforest_uf/f1656876486436x749996173050509200/Noises%20sound%20totally%20different%20on%20Mars%20than%20on%20Earth.%20Here%E2%80%99s%20why%20_%20Science%20News%20for%20Students.pdf
A rover called Perseverance got sound recordings on Mars but what Perseverance recorded weren’t the sounds of events on Mars. They were noises made when it fired a laser at nearby rocks. That zap created a sound wave that looks similar to thunder, but sound like thunder on a much smaller scale.
This data allowed the researchers to measure the speed of sound on Mars — and revealed a surprise. On this planet there’s more than one speed of sound, depending on how well the human can hear it. On Mars, within the range of human hearing, high pitched sounds travel at about 250 meters per second (559 miles per hour). Low-pitched sounds travel slower — about 240 meters per second (537 miles per hour). The low-pitched waves will travel just a few meters before becoming inaudible. While the higher sounds move over even shorter spans.
Of course, there aren’t birds on Mars to make sound — but that’s not why scientists study sound on alien worlds. Measuring the speed of sound can give scientists a precise way to study the atmosphere, says Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Air pressure, temperature, and humidity all affect the speed of sound. So, by measuring changes in the speed of sound over time, Chide says, researchers can learn more about weather. “We can measure temperature in small fractions of time,” he says — even day to day.
Article: https://s3.amazonaws.com/appforest_uf/f1656876486436x749996173050509200/Noises%20sound%20totally%20different%20on%20Mars%20than%20on%20Earth.%20Here%E2%80%99s%20why%20_%20Science%20News%20for%20Students.pdf
