In the end, the thriller of lightning on Mars is solved

Mini-lightning strikes created by whirling mud devils on Mars have been detected by chance by the microphone on board the Perseverance rover.

The likelihood discovery is direct proof of a type of lightning on Mars, researchers say in a report published in Nature. They describe how the rover’s microphone picked up indicators {of electrical} arcs only a few centimeters lengthy, which have been accompanied by audible shockwaves.

“There’s been a very big mystery about lightning on Mars for a long time. It’s probably one of the biggest mysteries about Mars,” says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning researcher at Cardiff University within the United Kingdom, who wasn’t a part of the analysis workforce however wrote an accompanying commentary for the journal.

“The key thing here,” he explains, “is that we actually have a rover on the surface of Mars that appears to have detected something that fits our idea of what we think lightning on Mars would look like.”

Besides Earth, flashes of lightning have been seen within the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and lightning has additionally been detected on Neptune and Uranus. But discovering lightning has confirmed extra elusive on our closest planetary neighbors — although experimenters within the Nineteen Seventies did lab work that instructed lightning ought to exist on Mars.

For instance, when researchers put volcanic sand right into a flask and pumped it right down to Martian atmospheric pressures, swirling the sand within the flask created a glow that may very well be seen in the dead of night, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The glow got here from electrical costs attributable to the friction between the bits of sand. If you had an even bigger buildup of electrical cost, he says, that would produce a extra sudden discharge, like what occurs with spark plugs in a automotive, or on a bigger scale, lightning. After all, even on Earth, lightning can occur in turbulent clouds of volcanic ash.

“So there’s no reason that blowing dust or sand on Mars shouldn’t become electrically charged,” says Lorenz.

Recently, he and a few colleagues have been reviewing audio picked up by the Perseverance rover, a car-size robotic that is been trundling round on the crimson planet since 2021. It’s received a microphone, and some years in the past scientists reported listening to the sounds of a whirling mud satan passing over the rover.

Besides the wind and the hiss of the mud, Lorenz says, there was a quick sound of a snap or crack in the course of the encounter. “We just assumed it was a big sand grain or a small gravel grain just, you know, hitting the structure,” he says.

But not too lengthy later, one among their workforce members attended a science convention and heard a speak about atmospheric electrical energy. “I thought that if there were discharges, we could hear them. And then, I remembered this recording,” says Baptiste Chide, who’s with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France.

So he did some experiments right here on Earth, utilizing an electrostatic generator, to see how electrical discharges would have an effect on the microphone. What he noticed was the identical alerts that had been captured on Mars; there was a particular sample of a quick electrical interference adopted by the acoustic sign of a shockwave.

Fifty-five such occasions have been picked up by the microphone over two Martian years, the researchers say, and the sparks have been often related to mud devils and the fronts of mud storms.

The electrical arcs would really feel and sound like robust static electrical energy sparks, says Chide. If an astronaut was on Mars, it may be potential to see them, though “small discharges are hard to see in strong sunshine, and it’s the sunniest times of day that have most dust devils and maybe most of the strong discharge events. That said, some events were at night,” he says.

The researchers assume it is necessary to review this atmospheric electrical exercise to know the hazards it may pose to future robotic or human missions. While most area {hardware} is designed to be strong, they notice that the Soviet Mars 3 mission landed throughout a mud storm and solely operated for about 20 seconds on the floor earlier than out of the blue and mysteriously ending its transmission.

“Something changed in 20 seconds,” says Lorenz. “Could it have been an electrical discharge event? I don’t think we can rule that out.”

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