For The First Time Ever: Listen To Otherworldly Sound Of Martian Winds Recorded By NASA’s InSight Lander

NASA’s InSight Lander has recorded the first sounds of martian wind during its operations on the red planet, reports Times Of India. The low-frequency sounds are of winds blowing at around 16-24 kph.

Scientists at NASA have commented on the ‘otherworldly quality’ of the reverberations. Thomas Pike of Imperial College London stated that the sound is "rather different to anything that we've experienced on Earth, and I think it just gives us another way of thinking about how far away we are getting these signals."

The audio is of the winds blowing against the InSight probe’s solar panels and the resultant tremble of the lander. The recording was made by an air pressure sensor of the probe’s weather station and by the seismometer at the spacecraft’s deck.

One reason for the low frequencies is Mars’s thin atmosphere but they are majorly attributable to the seismometer which is meant to record underground seismic waves, which do not reach the threshold of human hearing.

Bruce Banerdt, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said that hearing the sounds was like being "on a planet that's in some ways like the Earth, but in some ways really alien."