What are the implications for life?
Vaguely positive for abiogenesis, but not in a way that really moves the needle at all.
Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#52[dead]
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lightning is static electricity that builds in an atmosphere.
[deleted]
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#54This 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.
[deleted]
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#55This 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…
it's wild given how small and light basic microphone is. They even (probably not in 1999 tho) come with their own adc and serial interface now. Then again I guess there isn't any obvious need for it aside from PR points for "listening to mars"
Bandwidth and storage.
The Viking landers (1975) were very sophisticated with robotic arms and mass spectrometers, adorable little anemometers, digital colour cameras, the whole deal, with 5 megabytes of digital tape storage.
The downlink rate was 16 kbps when related by the matched orbiter; otherwise direct communication was at 250 bps.
The digital cameras were pushing the absolute limit of technology at the time. The digitizer produced a 16 kbps bitstream that fed the uncompressed image directly to the transmitter taking four minutes to send an image. It could also be stored on tape for later transmission, but it used much of the tape to do so.
If it had included a microphone and ADC, it would have been technically possible to record a few minutes of audio and then spend hours transferring it back to Earth. But the kind of constant monitoring now done really depends on the more than 1 Mbit/s of bandwidth now available thanks to half a dozen Martian orbiters, and all the fancy processors and gigabytes of storage the landers and rovers now have.
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#56This 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.
I think this is a mix of not having a word for this specific phenomenon, so inappropriately applying the closest, and the usual bad science reporting. They don't call it lighting in the actual paper, because not all discharge events are lightning.
Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lightning is static electricity that builds in an atmosphere.
Lightning is a discharge of static electricity, but a discharge of static electricity is not lightning.