Mars Microphone Won’t Just Hear the Sounds of Silence

A $15 microphone and a computer chip commonly found in talking toys will give the world its first earful of Mars--one 10-second sound bite at a time--when the Mars Polar lander touches down on the fourth planet this week.

Sponsored by the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, the tiny microphone is an interplanetary first. Its developers hope it will add a new sensory dimension to the exploration of the solar system.

The Mars microphone was developed by Janet Luhmann, Dave Curtis and Greg Delory at UC Berkeley. It is integrated into a Russian experiment aboard the lander.

Because the planet’s very low atmospheric pressure will distort sound waves, no one is certain what the microphone will pick up or what it will sound like, but organizers are certain that acoustic signals within human hearing range will be detected.

“There are natural sounds we should be able to hear,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the 100,000-member group. “There is wind. There is ice, sand and dust blowing about. There could be electrical discharges. We could hear the spacecraft itself.”

Any sounds that are recorded on Mars will be posted at https: //www.planetary.org as soon as they have been relayed to Earth.