The speed and behavior of sound on Mars is weird and insanely different from the Earth. Nasa has found out what makes it different.
The NASA Perseverance rover has been sent on a mission to examine the terrain of Mars and to look for any signs of previous life on the planet. However, it has been making interesting discoveries throughout the time it has spent there. After finding a bundle of strings and a mysterious-looking boulder recently, it has now helped NASA in finding out the speed of sound on the red planet. And the findings are nothing short of shocking. It turns out sound does not behave on Mars the same way it does on Earth. And because of it, hearing things on the red planet is an entirely different proposition.
Recently, a team of astronomers analyzed the sound captured by the Perseverance rover. Heading this team is Baptiste Chide who gave a presentation at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and revealed the findings of his team. According to a report by Space Psychiatrist, the findings suggest that not only the speed of sound on Mars is slower than Earth, but different pitches travel at different speeds making listening to the sound quite an ethereal experience.
NASA finds out speed of sound on Mars
Why sound behaves differently in Mars is because the speed of sound, unlike light, is not universally constant. As a result, in different mediums, atmospheric density and temperature, it travels differently. The Perseverance rover conducted an experiment where it used laser blasts on a nearby rock and recorded the time it took sound to return back to the rover’s microphone. It turns out that the speed of sound on Mars is actually slower than the Earth.
On Earth, sound travels at the speed of 343 meters per second. However, on Mars, where the atmosphere is quite weak, the speed of sound was calculated to be around 240 meters per second. This means it takes a sound longer time to travel the same distance on Mars compared to Earth. But that’s not all. Chide also found out that the speed of sound on Mars increases by 10 m/s for frequencies above 400Hz. What it means is that higher pitched frequencies will reach the listener faster than the bass frequencies.
This would make speech sound almost incomprehensible as the same sound will have a lag and the sound would feel broken down. In effect, you will wait , in what would seem like forever, to get the message and when it does arrive, you would not be able to understand what it is saying.
For all the latest Technology News Click Here
