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 to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
> The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing.
This could be misread to mean that Mars Polar Lander landed but the microphones didn't survive. Mars Polar Lander crashed and was presumed completely destroyed on impact. Last I heard, we still haven't found the crash site in orbital imagery.
> 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 to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
There was exactly one Mars rover, Curiosity, between 2008 and Percy.
Listening to hours of recording doesn't even seem like a lot considering this is the only microphone we have on another planet. You would need like 4 people doing this full time, which is a drop in the bucket for a project on this scale.
Of course this is not how it's done and almost all of the recording will just be wind or noise from the rover itself, which can easily be filtered out.
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.
8) Quiet but above-noise sound persisting for some time (might be worth checking out and then adjusting the cutoff level up, if it turns out to be more wind)
9) Complete silence (possibly malfunction) or sound levels dropping far below expected background (weird).
Well, there are these things called computers, and they’re really very good at this stuff. It’s not exactly rocket science (heh) to write a program to listen to an audio stream and mark and log every occurence of something else than background noise and ambient wind sounds (if Martian winds are even loud enough to make sound). Everything else that the rover has to do automatically is way more complicated.
It’s pretty likely that the entire stream of silence isn’t being stored, or sent to Earth, only the interesting parts. There isn’t any way for people to listen in real time anyway, because communications (can) only happen at specific times of the day. Every interplanetary mission works by sending a preplanned sequence of commands one day, then coming back the next day to see what the probe/rover/whatever sent back, then planning the next set of commands, and so on.
Yes, and don't forget that you need to modify & certify it to work in 1% of Earth atmospheric pressure and down to -75C, and get it integrated into flight software running on a RAD750.
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.
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.
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.
And a mountain is a bump on the ground. It does feel like "lightning" comes with context beyond how the charge was formed, even if it could be technically correct to say that's all it is. Of course almost nobody knows what triboelectric discharge is either, but sticking to "static electricity" fits well between the two.
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".
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.
I use it to give credit to peers if I've done something good (and maybe to take/share some blame if I wasn't directly responsible). The one that makes me cringe is people saying us/we when referring to their preferred sportsball team though
For this reason I've never understood the emotion "pride" when applied to anything you didn't personally do.
For example pride in getting a bug fixed, or running a personal record lap, makes perfect sense. But "proud to be an American," or "proud of our troops," "proud of some sports team," I just don't get it.
Yes. If I wasn't one of the group members, I shouldn't be included in the collective noun "we".
I did nothing to detect triboelectric discharge, I assure you. I have very low awareness of the thing. Why does the reporter assume I did anything? Why should I be bathed in the glory (or infamy) of it?
Similarly, when people say 'the UK has sent weapons to so-and-so', I object to being included, as if I had anything to do with it.
I think it's the false attribution, the welling of pride that I guess I'm meant to feel and the casual duplicitous use of language (lying, misleading) that bothers me.
Why not relay the truth of the matter, when its perfectly simple to do?
> Scientists analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Not with
> We analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Nor
> Humanity analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Somehow it would be weird to assume that "everybody" put the effort into this, but "we" all reap the success.
On the other hand, this is done with taxpayer money, and even if not, it is done in the context of the whole global economy and we are all interconnected and everybody steps on the shoulders of giants anyway, so, in the grand scale of things, a use of "we" can make sense for everything that happens.
Moreover, OP's argument holds also for the france case anyway.
I did not think much of the title before reading the parent comment as I also read "humanity", but now it's the lack of consistency and double standards that annoy me. "France detected Lightning on Mars", fine, let's stop cutting the funding of public research so we can keep on saying we. Also let's title "We released GPT-5", "We landed a rocket on a barge".
I assume you're downvoted for pedantry (understandable) but it is a real pattern. Whenever it's a space topic it's always "we" or "Japan" or "America". Nobody is so vague on other topics. I suspect it's a throwback to the Cold War space race when the major players did flights in a geopolitical context. If the institute's name is very long, like here, maybe "Scientists detected ..." or "Researchers ..."
Imho it's a quirk due to English's hate for the passive voice. Most languages would just go with "Lightning was detected on Mars". Naming the institute does not add any value to the average reader here, nor does the word "Scientists". "France" adds a bit of value, so that'd be the next best thing after the passive voice
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 to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
> The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing.
This could be misread to mean that Mars Polar Lander landed but the microphones didn't survive. Mars Polar Lander crashed and was presumed completely destroyed on impact. Last I heard, we still haven't found the crash site in orbital imagery.
> 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 to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
There was exactly one Mars rover, Curiosity, between 2008 and Percy.
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?
Listening to hours of recording doesn't even seem like a lot considering this is the only microphone we have on another planet. You would need like 4 people doing this full time, which is a drop in the bucket for a project on this scale.
Of course this is not how it's done and almost all of the recording will just be wind or noise from the rover itself, which can easily be filtered out.
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.
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
I'd add:
8) Quiet but above-noise sound persisting for some time (might be worth checking out and then adjusting the cutoff level up, if it turns out to be more wind)
9) Complete silence (possibly malfunction) or sound levels dropping far below expected background (weird).
Well, there are these things called computers, and they’re really very good at this stuff. It’s not exactly rocket science (heh) to write a program to listen to an audio stream and mark and log every occurence of something else than background noise and ambient wind sounds (if Martian winds are even loud enough to make sound). Everything else that the rover has to do automatically is way more complicated.
It’s pretty likely that the entire stream of silence isn’t being stored, or sent to Earth, only the interesting parts. There isn’t any way for people to listen in real time anyway, because communications (can) only happen at specific times of the day. Every interplanetary mission works by sending a preplanned sequence of commands one day, then coming back the next day to see what the probe/rover/whatever sent back, then planning the next set of commands, and so on.
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"
Yes, and don't forget that you need to modify & certify it to work in 1% of Earth atmospheric pressure and down to -75C, and get it integrated into flight software running on a RAD750.
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.
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...
...perhaps resolution and FPS provided by these orbital cameras are not exactly what one would expect.
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.
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.
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.
Lightning is static electricity that builds in an atmosphere.
And a mountain is a bump on the ground. It does feel like "lightning" comes with context beyond how the charge was formed, even if it could be technically correct to say that's all it is. Of course almost nobody knows what triboelectric discharge is either, but sticking to "static electricity" fits well between the two.
Lightning is a discharge of static electricity, but a discharge of static electricity is not lightning.
<sigh>
In the atmosphere!
How do we know it's not alien lightsaber battles tho?
What are the implications for life?
Vaguely positive for abiogenesis, but not in a way that really moves the needle at all.
same as before
Does that mean Mars' ground is electrically charged (positively or negatively) or what?
I assume it's earthe–wait.
Strange that the article doesn't say what this means for the formation of life.
Does it mean anything? There are some theories that lightning could be involved in abiogenesis on Earth, but it's not in any way a clear thing.
Dusty tornadoes and lightning? I'm beginning to like Mars.
Galvanizing!
I see waht you did there. But your comment is so subtle, it's boiling the frog of HN's humor reflex
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Are you saying you reject the use of "we" for any group that doesn't include you?
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.
It's specially annoying when people use it to latch on to achievements they had no part in. Like Americans today going "We stopped Hitler" etc.
I use it to give credit to peers if I've done something good (and maybe to take/share some blame if I wasn't directly responsible). The one that makes me cringe is people saying us/we when referring to their preferred sportsball team though
For this reason I've never understood the emotion "pride" when applied to anything you didn't personally do.
For example pride in getting a bug fixed, or running a personal record lap, makes perfect sense. But "proud to be an American," or "proud of our troops," "proud of some sports team," I just don't get it.
Ah, in that sense yeah, I also feel similarly. I thought that the article was written by someone on the discovering team, hence my confusion.
Yes. If I wasn't one of the group members, I shouldn't be included in the collective noun "we".
I did nothing to detect triboelectric discharge, I assure you. I have very low awareness of the thing. Why does the reporter assume I did anything? Why should I be bathed in the glory (or infamy) of it?
Similarly, when people say 'the UK has sent weapons to so-and-so', I object to being included, as if I had anything to do with it.
I think it's the false attribution, the welling of pride that I guess I'm meant to feel and the casual duplicitous use of language (lying, misleading) that bothers me.
Why not relay the truth of the matter, when its perfectly simple to do?
I'd assume most French would be happy with "France detected Lightning on Mars"
I read the title as equivalent to "Humanity detected Lightning on Mars", which I'm also perfectly happy with
The journalist writing the article starts with
> Scientists analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Not with
> We analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Nor
> Humanity analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.
Somehow it would be weird to assume that "everybody" put the effort into this, but "we" all reap the success.
On the other hand, this is done with taxpayer money, and even if not, it is done in the context of the whole global economy and we are all interconnected and everybody steps on the shoulders of giants anyway, so, in the grand scale of things, a use of "we" can make sense for everything that happens.
Moreover, OP's argument holds also for the france case anyway.
I did not think much of the title before reading the parent comment as I also read "humanity", but now it's the lack of consistency and double standards that annoy me. "France detected Lightning on Mars", fine, let's stop cutting the funding of public research so we can keep on saying we. Also let's title "We released GPT-5", "We landed a rocket on a barge".
Maybe let's extend it to negative things, too. "We crashed a Yugo into a bollard."
Right? It wasn’t me. So was it Gizmodo, the website where this was posted?
I assume you're downvoted for pedantry (understandable) but it is a real pattern. Whenever it's a space topic it's always "we" or "Japan" or "America". Nobody is so vague on other topics. I suspect it's a throwback to the Cold War space race when the major players did flights in a geopolitical context. If the institute's name is very long, like here, maybe "Scientists detected ..." or "Researchers ..."
> Whenever it's a space topic
It relates "us" to "earthlings". We, as in "humans", live on Earth. Space is "outside". We humans look outside to space and discover things there.
I feel it's more that sense of making clear that it's "us", humans, doing the discovery vs some other species or entity out there.
Imho it's a quirk due to English's hate for the passive voice. Most languages would just go with "Lightning was detected on Mars". Naming the institute does not add any value to the average reader here, nor does the word "Scientists". "France" adds a bit of value, so that'd be the next best thing after the passive voice
Passive voice in english is fine but it does not make for as catchy news articles (as also in other languages).
"Scientists detected lighting on mars" is also just fine.