Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35100-z
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NASA Mars Exploration Program
- CNES
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration [80NM0018D0004]
- NASA
- Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) [MDM-2017-0737]
- Comunidad de Madrid Project [S2018/NMT-4291]
- MCIN/AEI [PID2019-109467GB-I00, PRE2020-092562, RTI2018-098728-B-C31]
- Grupos Gobierno Vasco [IT1742-22]
- ESF Investing in your future
- InSight PSP Grant [80NSSC18K1626]
- Los Alamos National Laboratory [20210960PRD3]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Dust devils are important indicators of atmospheric turbulence and dust cycle on Mars. Understanding dust lifting and atmospheric transport is crucial for predicting dust storms and future space exploration. By using acoustic data recorded by the SuperCam instrument, the sound of a Martian dust devil provides valuable information about the wind structure and grain fluxes on Mars.
Dust devils (convective vortices loaded with dust) are common at the surface of Mars, particularly at Jezero crater, the landing site of the Perseverance rover. They are indicators of atmospheric turbulence and are an important lifting mechanism for the Martian dust cycle. Improving our understanding of dust lifting and atmospheric transport is key for accurate simulation of the dust cycle and for the prediction of dust storms, in addition to being important for future space exploration as grain impacts are implicated in the degradation of hardware on the surface of Mars. Here we describe the sound of a Martian dust devil as recorded by the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover. The dust devil encounter was also simultaneously imaged by the Perseverance rover's Navigation Camera and observed by several sensors in the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer instrument. Combining these unique multi-sensorial data with modelling, we show that the dust devil was around 25m large, at least 118m tall, and passed directly over the rover travelling at approximately 5ms(-1). Acoustic signals of grain impacts recorded during the vortex encounter provide quantitative information about the number density of particles in the vortex. The sound of a Martian dust devil was inaccessible until SuperCam microphone recordings. This chance dust devil encounter demonstrates the potential of acoustic data for resolving the rapid wind structure of the Martian atmosphere and for directly quantifying wind-blown grain fluxes on Mars.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available