Rover Perseverance makes 1st recording of laser sound on Mars: NASA
Thursday, 11 March 2021 (23:47 IST)
Moscow: US rover Perseverance has made the first recordings of its laser during a mission on Mars, NASA has said.
The mission published three audio files, the first of which was made 18 hours after landing. The first two recordings are mostly the sound of wind, while the third has the sound of the rover’s laser impacting a rock.
“The first readings from the SuperCam instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover have arrived on Earth. SuperCam was developed jointly by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and a consortium of French research laboratories under the auspices of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The instrument delivered data to the French Space Agency’s operations center in Toulouse that includes the first audio of laser zaps on another planet,” NASA said in a statement.
Perseverance was launched in July last year and landed on the surface of Mars in February. Since then, the rover sent to Earth photos from Mars, as well as a video made during the landing. Last week, the rover completed its first test drive since its arrival on the Red Planet. (UNI)