NASA Mars rover captures first sound of dust devil on red planet

The Perseverance rover happened to have its microphone on when the 18-metre dust devil passed over it. “We hit the jackpot” when the rover’s microphone picked up the noise made by the dust devil overhead, the study’s lead author Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, told AFP. Given that the rover’s SuperCam microphone was turned on for less than three minutes every few days, Murdoch said it was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did. Of the 84 minutes collected in its first year, there’s “only one dust devil recording”, she told the AP in an email from France. “We hear the wind associated with the dust devil, the moment it arrives, then nothing because we are in the eye of the vortex,” said Murdoch, a planetary researcher at France’s ISAE-SUPAERO space research institute, where the SuperCam’s microphone was designed.