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Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

gizmodo.com

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Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#31

Post by freehorse »

stavros wrote: post #23
freehorse wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it is essentially more about if it includes the author of the article. In the specific case, the author is a journalist not a scientist part of the actual group that did the work, so their "we" seems to forcingly include everybody in the planet, thus also OP here. I dont think OP would have an issue if one of the scientists in this case used "we".

Ah good shout, I was assuming the author of the article was also on the team of the discovery, but it's Gizmodo, so I shouldn't have thought that.

Yeah tbh the comment sounded weird to me at first, prob because the actual problem is not that I (ie the reader) am not part of the people that made the discovery, but because the author of the article who uses "we" is not. Maybe if I was part of such a discovery it would actually feel even weirder reading somebody I have not worked with on it as "we did it", but I have not been part of such a newsworthy discovery to test it.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#33

Post by irjustin »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #17

What blows my mind is that we had not before. I would think that with all that dust flying around it's got to be pretty common. And we have satellites orbiting Mars for decades and apparently we didn't see any.

This lightning is only a few centimeters long: https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2025/11/26/at-l...

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#34

Post by shevy-java »

Thor is there, swinging his ...

hammer.

Edit: Wait a moment ... that's not actually lightning?

"By listening to the sounds of Mars, the team identified interference and acoustic signatures in the recordings that are characteristic of lightning."

So they could only listen to sound? I mean, aren't pictures more convincing? We need more cameras on Mars.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#36

Post by henrebotha »

chistev wrote: post #28
wongarsu wrote: post #11

This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars. The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky t…

How does this work in practice. If a microphone is up there, it's constantly listening for things right? So how do humans here on Earth go over it to know if a sound was picked up knowing there's hours of recording? Is it that the whole system is programmed to show a spike when sound is captured?

This doesn't require anything fancy. I haven't used my sound engineering qualification in 14 years and I could do it by hand. You can visually scan through the recorded waveform and look for shapes that stand out. Simple audio processing techniques like using a noise gate to shut off the volume whenever the input level is below some configured threshold can make this even easier.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#37

Post by yesco »

irjustin wrote: post #32

This isn't lightning like we think on earth. It's only a few centimeters long which is why it's never been detected before except by microphone[0]. [0] https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2025/11/26/at-l...

Wouldn't it be static electricity in that case and not lightning? Not sure if this is just a technical definition thing I'm missing or if lightning just makes a cooler sounding headline.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#40

Post by bobmcnamara »

chistev wrote: post #28
wongarsu wrote: post #11

This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars. The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky t…

How does this work in practice. If a microphone is up there, it's constantly listening for things right? So how do humans here on Earth go over it to know if a sound was picked up knowing there's hours of recording? Is it that the whole system is programmed to show a spike when sound is captured?

If you have enough RAM, start with a ring buffer.

On interesting event: compress and transfer the relevant chunk of audio from the ring buffer back to Earth.

Interesting event trigger ideas:

1) loud sound after quiet time

2) manual timestamp request from control

3) video clip recording

4) midnight, sunrise, noon, sunset. These are mostly so you have some daily baseline.

5) science package running

6) rover moving

7) abrupt camera change

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