On Mars, dust devils can get extremely big. But they’re still a mystery.
to keep robotic missions going. Current models especially struggle to predict the large global dust storms, and that seems to be because it’s hard to model the forces that are lifting dust up off the planet’s surface.
That’s where the microphone comes in. “What our microphone is sensitive to is specifically the wind speed. So when we see wind gusts, we see a large increase in the sound amplitude on the microphone, just like when you’re talking on the phone and it’s windy,” Murdoch explained. “We’re using that background noise to study the wind.”
A spectrogram of the dust devil data. From the study authors: “This is a spectrogram of the microphone sound pressure level showing the low frequency wind noise, the high frequency grain impacts and also the rover pump harmonic at 760 Hz. A large grain impact causes an acoustic echo at approximately 6 kHz due to sound reflections from the base of the microphone.
“Our sampling rate is much higher than all of the regular weather sensors that you’ll find on planetary rovers and planetary landers,” Murdoch said. “With a microphone, it’s a bit like using a microscope. We’re looking at what’s happening at these really short time scales.”
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