Strictly speaking, what NASA’s InSight landing module is not a microphone, but a seismograph. An apparatus designed to study and to help us better understand the deep geological structure of the planet.

However, once there, the probe began to capture other sounds of Martian daily life: the wind gusts, the movements of the robotic arm of the module and even the internal sounds that the seismograph itself produces when the temperature changes. Now we can listen and generate a strange feeling.

This is how Mars sounds

At this time, just under a year, leading the mission on the red planet has heard more than 100 tremors compatible with martemot. For example, we have confirmed that on Earth, seismic waves travel much faster because active geological processes fill the holes in the earth’s crust.

On Mars, however, everything seems to be full of corners and cracks that interrupt the flow of seismic waves across the planet. In addition, the particular atmospheric conditions of the red planet are reflected in the InSight recordings and allow us to imagine how human life would be heard up there.

What NASA has done is ‘sonify’ those records so that we can hear how they sound and have uploaded them to the internet. In the first, we can hear a martemoto of magnitude 3.7 (detected on May 22, 2019); in the second, one of magnitude 3.3 (from July 25, 2019) and in the third, the sound that the seismograph makes when it cools.