Here ’s What a Sunrise On Mars ‘Sounds’ Like

George W. Bush was still in his first term in the White House and Barack Obama was a member of the Illinois state legislature when the Opportunity rover landed on Mars on January 25, 2004. The spacecraft had an expected minimum lifetime of 90 Martian sols — or Martian days, which, at 24 hours, 39 minutes each, are only a little longer than an Earth day. NASA typically lowballs these estimates in order to help a spacecraft exceed official expectations, and the odds were good that Opportunity would keep working for at least a couple years. What no one expected was for that couple of years to grow to 15 years. Opportunity currently rests in Endeavour Crater just below the Martian equator, and while NASA lost contact with the ship after a dust storm in June, the agency continues to try to reconnect with it. But if Opportunity is at last lost, it at least left a bit of music behind. At the 2018 Supercomputing Conference in Dallas on November 13, engineers from England’s University of Exeter unveiled what they dubbed a Martian “soundscape,” a two-minute harmonic composition that captures — or, more precisely, interprets — the sound of a sunrise on Mars. The particular sunrise they chose was a special one, the 5,000th Opportunity witnessed on Mars. The Exeter engineers began with a picture of the sun hanging low over the Martian horizon, and then began analyzing and processing it a pixel at a time. The picture was scanned left to right, and each ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news