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A dust devil looks a bit like a tornado, but is weaker and rarely lasts more than about a minute.

It is a twisting column of warmed air scooting across sun-heated ground, made visible by the dust that it lofts upwards. Although usually benign, occasionally dust devils can kill.

Dust devils have been known to appear on Mars since the 1970s. They have been observed both from the ground and from orbit.

The more dust in the Martian atmosphere, the warmer and more agitated it becomes, and this can escalate into a global dust storm.

When the dust settles, it can coat and disable the solar panels that are essential for many of the instruments we’ve landed on the planet.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how these devils function. But new research, published this week in Nature Communications, has recorded what dust devils sound like – giving fresh insights into how they operate.

But it also raises questions about how future astronauts would detect and interpret sounds on the red planet.

There has been a vast amount of erosion on Mars since the last rivers and lakes vanished, including at the landing sites of both Nasa’s current rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.

Although the erosive power of an individual dust devil is tiny, a billion years worth of dust devils could potentially have worn away kilometres of rock.

There are thus many reasons for wanting to better understand how dust devils function.

And we now know what a Martian dust devil sounds like thanks to the new study led by Naomi Murdoch of Toulouse University in France.

Many passing dust devils have been imaged by cameras on Mars landers and rovers, but Murdoch and her team report a dust devil that luckily passed exactly over the Perseverance rover on September 27, 2021, which was on the floor of Jezero crater.

The rover’s masthead camera, named SuperCam, includes a microphone, and this recorded the sound of the wind rising and falling as the dust devil passed over.

In detail, the wind noise rose when the leading wall of the vortex arrived, followed by a lull representing the calm air in the eye of the vortex, before a second episode of wind noise as the trailing wall of the vortex passed over.

This took less than ten seconds, and you can hear the sound recording here(https://jirafeau.isae-supaero.fr/f.php?h=2JWSkdJR&p=1) (turn your volume to max). Other sensors gave information too. They showed that the pressure fell to a minimum between the two bursts of wind noise – which to me is consistent with sucking rather than blowing – and also recorded impacts of individual dust grains onto the rover.

The dust devil was about 25 metres in diameter, at least 118 metres tall, and was tracking across the ground at about five metres per second.

The maximum wind speed in the rotating vortex was probably just under 11 metres per second, equating to a “fresh” to “strong” breeze on Earth.

Did it really sound like that? Listening to a recording purporting to be the sound of Martian wind is all very well, but is this really what we would hear if we were there ourselves? The first thing to note is that this does genuinely originate as “real sound”, unlike other data such as images or radio signals turned into sound (a process known as sonification), such as the so-called sound of two black holes colliding or radio noise from from Venus’s atmosphere.

The dust devil audio file contains actual sound waves picked up by a microphone on Mars.

There the atmosphere is much thinner than on Earth (Martian surface pressure is less than a hundredth of ours), so the high frequency component of sound hardly carries (scientists say it’s “attenuated”).

The result is that the wind sounds much lower in pitch than a similar wind on Earth.

The only other planetary body from which we have genuine sound recordings is Venus, where in 1982 two Soviet “Venera” landers recorded wind and lander operation noises.

However, if you were on Mars you could never hear the wind directly with your own ears.

If you were foolish enough to expose your ears to Mars’s atmosphere, the low external pressure would cause your eardrums to burst, and you would be instantly deaf as well as having no air to breathe.

If you were to go outside in a pressurised spacesuit (a much more sensible idea), what you would hear would depend on how well the sound waves were transmitted through the solid shell of your helmet, and then on how these were turned back into sound waves in the air inside your helmet.

In other words, you would hear a distorted version of what an external microphone would pick up. Imagine walking round on Earth with your head inside a goldfish bowl and you’ll get part of the idea.

If future human explorers on Mars want to hear what’s going on in the external environment, I suspect they will rely on a suit-mounted microphone feeding to wireless ear buds, although I can’t find any evidence that that this has yet been factored into Mars suit design.

This all boils down to a recording from external microphone being the best way to represent sounds on Mars, or indeed any other planet that has an atmosphere.

If you want to hear some more sounds from Mars, NASA has a collection of audio recordings you can listen to.


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NISAR Launches July 30: A NASA-ISRO Satellite to Track Earth’s Changes

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NISAR Launches July 30: A NASA-ISRO Satellite to Track Earth’s Changes

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, a joint Earth science mission, is now set for launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The pickup-truck-sized spacecraft was encapsulated in the nose cone of an Indian Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle and is scheduled to lift off on Wednesday, July 30 at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:40 p.m. IST). Once in orbit, its dual-frequency radars will circle Earth 14 times a day, scanning nearly all of the planet’s land and ice surfaces every 12 days. It will provide data to help scientists monitor soil moisture and vegetation, and better assess hazards like landslides and floods.

International Collaboration and Launch Readiness

According to the official website, NISAR reflects a significant NASA–ISRO partnership. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built the long-wavelength L-band radar, and India’s Space Applications Centre built the shorter-wavelength S-band radar. This dual-frequency design makes NISAR the first Earth satellite to carry two radar systems, underscoring the mission’s unique collaboration.

The spacecraft is now integrated into its launch vehicle at India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. On July 28 NASA announced NISAR had been encapsulated in the payload fairing of an ISRO Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle on the pad. The GSLV is scheduled to lift off at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:40 p.m. IST) on Wednesday, July 30.

Advanced Dual-Frequency Radar

NISAR carries a novel dual-frequency radar system. The satellite’s instruments operate at L-band (25 cm) and S-band (10 cm) wavelengths. The longer L-band waves can penetrate forests and soil to sense moisture and land motion, while the shorter S-band waves pick up fine surface details like vegetation moisture and roughness. This combination lets NISAR detect both large-scale and fine-scale changes.

From orbit, NISAR will circle Earth 14 times per day, scanning nearly all land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. Its data will track changes like the advance or retreat of polar ice sheets and slow ground shifts from earthquakes, and will also aid agriculture and disaster planning by helping monitor crops and prepare for floods and hurricanes.

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Doomed Exoplanet TOI-2109b Spirals Toward Its Star with Three Possible Fates

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Doomed Exoplanet TOI-2109b Spirals Toward Its Star with Three Possible Fates

The gas giant TOI-2109b is more than five times as massive as Jupiter, and resides in a perilous orbit 870 light-years from our planet. As an “ultrahot Jupiter,” it completes a lap around its parent star in a mere 16 hours, the briefest orbit of any such planet known. It is baking its atmosphere to broiling temperatures, and inching closer to oblivion in an orbit that is slowly pulling it in toward its parent sun. Using archived space telescope data from TESS and Cheops, astronomers have observed the testimony of this inevitable spiral, and contemplated three (wildly divergent) possible fates of the doomed planet.

Fates for TOI-2109b

According to the new research, conducted with data from NASA’s TESS and ESA’s Cheops missions shows that TOI-2109b’s orbit is decaying — a process it will continue for thousands of Earth’s years to come by 10 seconds over three Earth years. This proves that it is in a process of slow in fall. If the decay becomes worse, the planet may start falling directly into its host star and create a luminous flare, just like ZTF SLRN-2020. Alternatively, the star’s tidal forces could permanently warp the planet and rip it asunder.

A Potential Planetary Rebirth

There is a third, less-tragic possibility which could happen through a process of photoevaporation, in which strong radiation from the hosting star removes TOI-2109b’s gaseous envelope to reveal its rocky core. If the planet shrinks quickly enough, it might survive the process, avoiding its destruction by spiraling within its eternal Roche limit, and settling as a super-Earth or Neptune-sized blow-up hard relic. Then TOI-2109b would be an odd, rare opportunity to witness up close how this process unfolds.

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Hubble Spots Interstellar Invader Comet 3I/ATLAS for the First Time

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Hubble Spots Interstellar Invader Comet 3I/ATLAS for the First Time

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken its initial shots of comet 3I/ATLAS, a comet visiting us from beyond our solar system that recently fell apart — but not before it struck a pose for the cameras. It’s only the third such object ever known, after 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. The subject of numerous scientific tweets and some frantic searches by astronomers anxious to figure out just what it is — and where it came from — before it is gone into the pitch black of deep space forever, 3I/ATLAS was first sighted by the ATLAS survey telescope on July 1, 2025.

Ancient Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Offers Clues to Planetary Systems Beyond Our Own

According to As per Space.com, recent studies indicate that 3I/ATLAS could be some 7 billion years old, well beyond the 4.6 billion years of our solar system. That’s an indication that the comet arose in the more ancient parts of the Milky Way, which would give researchers a rare glimpse of what the early days of other planetary systems were like. Undergraduate researcher Astrafoxen first flagged the Hubble images on Bluesky, noting the comet’s “nice and puffy” coma, despite interference from cosmic rays.

A newly available preprint paper has already revealed that 3I/ATLAS contains abundant water ice and a dust makeup resembling D-type asteroids—organic-rich bodies typically found in the outer solar system. Unlike ultrared trans-Neptunian objects, D-types are believed to have high carbon and silicate content, potentially shedding light on the comet’s deep-space origins and volatile chemistry.

The comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered just as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory was gearing up to carry out its initial observations of the heavens, dovetailing with the LSST’s expected discovery of many more interstellar objects in the coming decade.

Until then, 3I/ATLAS holds the astronomical spotlight. Its brief solar system passage offers a precious opportunity for researchers to analyse the material makeup of alien planetary systems. The Hubble images, now available for download, are expected to aid future papers as scientists continue to unravel the story of this ancient cosmic traveller.

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