The atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet’s surface is small, amounting to less than 1% of Earth's sea level pressure. Given that sound waves need an atmospheric medium through which to travel, many people are surprised to learn that any sounds at all can be heard on Mars. Perseverance sent back its first audio clips shortly after landing in 2021. In 2016, NASA announced it was including two microphones on its Perseverance rover mission. NASA's Mars Phoenix lander had a microphone aboard, but it had to be turned off before launch due to last-minute technical difficulties. We were scheduled to refly the microphone experiment on a French Mars mission called Netlander that was ultimately canceled in 2004. Sadly, the spacecraft crashed on Mars later that year. It was the first citizen-funded science experiment to fly to another world. Planetary Society members and supporters funded the world's first Mars microphone on NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which launched in 1999.
"Even if only a few minutes of Martian sounds are recorded from this first experiment, the public interest will be high and the opportunity for scientific exploration real," Sagan wrote. The audio from the Red Planet fulfills a 25-year Planetary Society campaign that began with a letter co-founder Carl Sagan wrote to NASA in 1996, urging the agency to include a microphone aboard its next Mars lander: Thanks to microphones sent to Mars in 2021 aboard NASA's Perseverance rover, we now know what Mars sounds like.
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