The Perseverance rover was able to record the sound of dust particles that swirled around it during a storm. This audio recording could be the key to understanding how dust travels across the Red Planet.. com.

Recorded using a microphone mounted on a SuperCam tool on September 27, 2021. Other instruments also recorded the "

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The rover has already managed to capture 90 dust devils that swept past it. But this one was the first time Perseverance was able to quickly turn on his mic..

“Thanks to this recording of the dust devil, we can hear and count the particles colliding with the rover,” said study lead author Naomi Murdoch of the Graduate Institute of Aeronautics and Space at the University of Toulouse..

Scientists studied all the data and were able to determine that the diameter of the dust devil was about 25 meters, the height was 118 meters, it was moving at a speed of 5.3 meters per second..

Using the analysis of the number of impacts, scientists for the first time managed to determine the number of dust particles in a dust whirlwind. In total, 308 beats are heard in the recording, which were distributed over three beams. The first of them appeared when the storm reached Perseverance, and the last - when its trailing edge reached the rover with dust accumulating in the walls of the vortex.

But the largest number of collisions was recorded when the center of a low-pressure vortex was rotating above the rover.. It surprised scientists. They expected that most of the dust would be concentrated in the walls of the dust whirlwind, where the wind speed is high.. The center of the dust whirl, like the eye of the storm, should be relatively calm and clean compared to the walls of the whirlwind.

But specifically in this dust devil, the highest concentration of dust was in the center of the vortex.

Previous research has shown that dust devils and isolated wind gusts are responsible for the persistence of dust in the Martian atmosphere, even away from dust storms.. However, it is not known what role dust whirlwinds play in raising dust from the surface of the planet..

Previously, scientists from the Pennsylvania State University found signs that 3.5 billion years ago there was a vast ocean on Mars that covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.. Its existence was indicated by the topography of the coastline, revealed in numerous images of the Red Planet..