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Saturn Hailstorm

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wear-your-hard-hat dept.

crmartin writes "NASA has released a web story about the sounds recorded aboard the Cassini spacecraft as it pased through the Rings. The story includes a Quicktime file of the hailstorm-like sounds of Ring particles impacting."

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sound in Space? by dsanfte · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the article:

    Each time a dust particle hit Cassini, the impact produced a puff of plasma--a tiny cloud of ionized gas. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was able to count these clouds; there were as many as 680 puffs per second. "We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," says Gurnett, the intrument's principal investigator.


    They were recording plasma, not actual sound.
    --
    occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
  2. No microphone by jgs · · Score: 5, Informative
    What I don't really get is why they have friggin microphones on space traveling vehicles?

    They don't. TFA to the rescue again:
    Each time a dust particle hit Cassini, the impact produced a puff of plasma--a tiny cloud of ionized gas. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was able to count these clouds; there were as many as 680 puffs per second. "We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," says Gurnett, the intrument's principal investigator.

    In other words, the sound is a representation of other data, slightly akin to false color images as an earlier poster pointed out.

    I can understand that it's a cheap thing to just throw in there

    I don't think anything with mass is cheap to add to a space probe. I don't recall what the per-kilo launch costs are for one of those things, but it's not small.