This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars.
The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
How does this work in practice. If a microphone is up there, it's constantly listening for things right?
So how do humans here on Earth go over it to know if a sound was picked up knowing there's hours of recording?
Is it that the whole system is programmed to show a spike when sound is captured?
> The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
There was exactly one Mars rover, Curiosity, between 2008 and Percy.
What are the implications for life?
What blows my mind is that we had not before. I would think that with all that dust flying around it's got to be pretty common. And we have satellites orbiting Mars for decades and apparently we didn't see any.
...perhaps resolution and FPS provided by these orbital cameras are not exactly what one would expect.
Strange that the article doesn't say what this means for the formation of life.
Does that mean Mars' ground is electrically charged (positively or negatively) or what?
I assume it's earthe–wait.