hi. i promised at least one of you faithful NAP posters that i would make efforts to post earlier in the day sunday so that other faithful NAP readers would have something fresh to read on sundays. well, i fully intended to write something last night, but then i decided that i wanted to talk about mars this week. there’s a pretty good reason for this – we landed there today. yaay!

one of the best things about working at NASA is the unexpected opportunities that come up. like last week i was working away in my little cubicle and i overheard my boss on his way over to the smithsonian institution for a private tour backstage in the meteorite collection. i stood up and asked if i could come, and by the time we got out the front door, we were a nice gaggle of HQ science mission directorate folk.

on our walk down and across the national mall, my boss mentioned that he had been talking with the phoenix team and had heard that they weren’t planning to turn on the microphone. originally, the mars descent imager, after we discovered a potentially fatal problem, was cancelled. that meant that no descent images would be taken and the microphone would remain off. my boss wasn’t happy with this – he started talking about how exciting it would be to have sounds from mars, and how he wanted to hear recordings from the microphones. he said that he had instructed the phoenix team to turn the micrphone back on after landing.

that got me thinking (again) about sound on mars. to date, we have no recordings from sound on the surface, and so we can only model and simulate how things would sound. a few people have looked at this in detail. google searches come up with a few serious researchers like amanda hanford, who have gotten press for papers on this subject. she did some nice monte carlo simulations of sound on mars. and there are other little things on the topic here and there on the web. but i want recordings! please?

i like the idea that if you were able to breathe carbon dioxide the way we breathe helium in a balloon, our voices would be lower. according to hanford’s models, because of the reduced pressure on mars and the difference in molecular weight, the speed of sound is slower and the increased absorption means it doesn’t travel as far. this article says that if you screamed on mars, the scream would only travel a few hundred feet as opposed to a kilometer on earth. don’t get mugged on mars.

my boss got unexpectedly animated when talking about hearing sounds from mars. this made me pretty happy. he’s a cool guy – very enthusiastic about space, and the perfect guy to be heading up the planetary science division. i saw him today in the control room at the phonix landing. he looked relaxed and happy. it was good to see.

all i can say is that i hope that his word is gospel, and they turn that microphone on. if it happens, i will post the results here.

i want sounds. i really want to hear the wind and lightning and the sound of dust smashing against rocks. if only we’d found the budget to send a speaker so we could record sounds we made ourselves.

i guess we’ll have to wrangle that onto mars science laboratory.

anyway, yay! we made it to mars. i am unspeakably relieved, along with a few hundred of my closest colleagues. given our track record at mars (painfully recounted in the first chapter of my thesis), landing there is not something we take for granted.