A Greek musician constructed a microphone that was placed on NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover which was sent to the planet Mars to record the sounds on the red planet.

Iason Achilleas Mezilis designed an experimental audio recording device after his team made the necessary adaptations to a microphone they procured on the market. Iason Achilles Mezilis is a Los Angeles–based rock musician, composer, and lifelong space enthusiast.

This experimental device is currently on Mars along with another audio recorder made by French scientists.

“The other microphone is mainly for science, to study the sounds that rocks make when they explode when they are struck by lasers. Our microphone is primarily there to be cool. It is more to fascinate and inspire “, said among other things the Greek musician.

This is not the first attempt to record sound on Mars. The Soviets had pursued it in the early 1980s and NASA in 1999 and 2008 but to no avail.

A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

feature image credit – YouTube channel Jason Achilles