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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

My question is why was the “sound of Mars” release only 18 seconds long?

Why not record hours of what it sounds like to be on another planet? Even the sound recordings from decades ago on (I think Titan) was only a short creepy clip.

I understand it’s mostly going to be wind and interspliced with the robots sounds but I still don’t get how we don’t have hours of Mars already.

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My guess would be bandwidth. Every bit of bandwidth is precious, so they probably dont have the spare budget to send long audio files without obvious scientific value...

Yes, but you could record few minutes of sound in the same amount of data taken by one high res photo. I think the good question is why 18 seconds specifically.

It's just 18 seconds so far. I doubt they sent the microphone just so they could use it once, but then I doubt sending hours of audio was at the top of the priority list for the first few days of the mission.

Maybe after they complete their primary and secondary mission objectives, they'll find spare time and compute to stream a couple hours of Martian ambience. Does NASA have a suggestion box for after hours / extended program experiments?

I doubt a NASA suggestion box open to the internet will be very fruitful.

I for one look forward to Rover McRoverface in the 2022 launch window.

Marvin McMarsface is to take a close-up look at the Face On Mars in 2023 and then implant an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator to eliminate Mars because it obstructs our view of Venus.

> I doubt a NASA suggestion box open to the internet will be very fruitful.

The two resectful and fun comments between 'this' comment and your comment.

I can imagine a Tumblr/Reddit re-post would be more fun, but-yes-not for the NASA suggestion box. They would have 1 diamond idea every 100k unusable ones.

I can imagine every gaming company would LOVE to have the original Mars sound in their games (e.g. "No Man's Sky").

In a world where the sounds of sports on TV is not even the true sound of what's happening in the stadium because it's boring, I highly doubt they would pay a single penny for what would probably be a highly disappointing wind-like monotonous sound.

One of the most beautiful and haunting things I've ever heard was a tape cassette that had EM signals recorded by Voyager transposed into human-audible sound domain somehow. It was like whale song of space.

I found it here (there's a series on other planets/moons as well in the recommendations):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAZWb9_si4

And Cassini flying into Saturn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWHLCHv4PiI

I wonder what it sounds like to leave the atomosphere now too, I guess this is as close as we can get in the near future. Even with probes going 15km/s.

Ah yeah, that's the kind of thing! Cheers! The tape was recorded much earlier though (I was listening to it in the late 90's IIRC) and a lot longer.

Perseverance is the first rover with microphones on Mars. This is why we don't have audios from prior missions.

Working microphones. They've sent microphones previously, which have either failed or been on missions that crashed.

IIRC the Mars Insight mission was able to reconstruct the sounds of wind in Mars from signals picked up by their super sensitive seismometter.

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