A towering dust storm that engulfed the Mars Perseverance rover in September 2021 was a colossal 390.4 feet (119 meters) tall, the first-ever audio recording of a dust devil on the surface of Mars reveals.
The recording, an analysis of which was published Tuesday (Dec. 13) in the journal Nature Communications (opens in new tab), also reveals brand-new information about how these short-lived phenomena move dust around on the Red Planet.
“We can actually hear the noise of particles impacting the rover,” study lead author Naomi Murdoch (opens in new tab), a physicist at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space (ISAE-SUPAERO) at the University of Toulouse in France, told Live Science. “The sound of these impacts allows us to count how many particles were in the vortex.”
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