After unveiling the first original sound from Mars, NASA has just released an amusing simulator that can record your voice (or any other sound) and “convert” it as if it were emitted from the red planet.
The Sounds of Mars simulator allows you to record a 10-second voice message and then compare the original result on Earth with what it would have sounded like from Mars. The result is not particularly spectacular, the voice just sounds farther away, as if muffled.
Once on the Sounds of Mars page, choose the “You on Mars” option and record your message by holding down the record button until the end of the 10 seconds. The tool will then convert your sound and offer you to compare the original to the one that would have been recorded on Mars. You are then free to download them and share them via your social network accounts.
Test Sounds of Mars by clicking on the link here.
A few days ago, NASA made history after its Perseverance rover landed on Mars. Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its descent to the planet’s surface.
Moments after touchdown, Perseverance beamed back its first black-and-white images from the Martian surface, one of them showing the rover’s shadow cast on the desolate, rocky landing site.
Because it takes radio waves 11 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, the SUV-sized rover had already reached Martian soil by the time its arrival was confirmed by signals relayed to Earth from one of several satellites orbiting Mars.
The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk called it an “amazing accomplishment.”
The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7 billion endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.
Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.
Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.
(With inputs from AFP)