NASA Mars rover captures crackling lightning. Hear the ‘thunder’ yourself.

Scientists now have proof that Mars‘ dusty storms can generate mini lightning, putting to rest decades of speculation.

The discovery came from a microphone aboard NASA‘s Perseverance rover, a lab on six wheels exploring the Jezero Crater region. While it was listening to Martian winds spinning and spitting dust, it also picked up something no one had heard there before: crackles and pops that turned out to be small electrical shocks within dust devils and storm fronts. 

Of course, everything on Mars has to be different from Earth — not even the thunder can sound like thunder. Instead, these tiny bits of lightning give off sounds more like those that people blockociate with static electricity — the shuffling-of-your-socked-feet-and-touching-a-doorknob variety.

Over two Martian years, researchers identified 55 brief discharges — usually when dust devils pblocked close by or when the leading edges of dust storms rolled over the rover. Now people can listen to the Martian lightning themselves. NASA released a recording, featured in the YouTube video below, this week. 

“We got some good ones where you can clearly hear the ‘snap’ sound of the spark,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Perseverance scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, in a statement. 

Scientists have long studied dust devils churning up Martian dirt. About 13 years ago, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught sight of an extraordinary one with a column stretching 12 miles into the sky.

Dust devils on Mars form similarly to those on Earth, despite the fact that Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner. They tend to happen on dry days when the ground gets hotter than the surrounding area. Typically smaller than tornadoes, dust devils are whirlwinds that make a funnel-like chimney, channeling hot air up and around. The rotating wind accelerates similar to the way spinning ice skaters move faster as they bring their arms closer to their bodies.

As wind-blown grains bang into each other, they swap tiny electric charges. Over time, those charges build strong electric fields that can lead to sparks or even lightning, especially inside volcanic ash clouds. The Red Planet is covered in fine dust and constantly experiences dust devils and mblockive storms, so scientists have expected similar charging there. 

“On Mars, the thin atmosphere makes the phenomenon far more likely,” said Baptiste Chide, a Perseverance scientist at L’Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in France, in a statement, “as the amount of charge required to generate sparks is much lower than what is required in Earth’s near-surface atmosphere.”

Lab experiments and computer models predicted this. That raised the possibility that even modest charging could produce flashes.

Scientists have do***ented lightning on Jupiter and Saturn, and they suspected for decades that Mars has lightning, too. But no one had ever observed it directly — that is, until now.

Though Perseverance hasn’t caught one of these little lightning events on camera, its hot mic has picked up their pops just as dust clouds have swept past. In addition to the audio, the instrument made electromagnetic recordings.

Scientists noticed that the sparks occurred when dust lifted and collided, not simply when it hung in the air. It is the motion and friction of grains, not just having dusty skies, that drive the electricity, they said. Their findings now appear in the journal Nature. 

Although the rover encountered only two strong dust devils during this period, both produced detectable sparks. That means countless other whirlwinds across the planet are likely doing the same thing. Even more significant are the thousands of dust storms that form each year. Scientists suspect those turbulent, miles-long storm fronts produce far more electricity than isolated dust devils.

Electrical discharges from Martian lightning may change the chemistry of the planet’s surface. They can create compounds like hydrogen peroxide, chlorine gases, and perchlorates that destroy organic matter. These reactions may help explain why scientists struggle to find well-preserved traces of ancient life at the surface.

Understanding this phenomenon is important to keep spacecraft and future astronauts safe on the Red Planet, according to NASA. Fortunately, decades of rover missions have not experienced any serious electrical damage. Still, the research team notes that the Soviet Mars 3 lander, which stopped transmitting only seconds after landing during a dust storm in 1971, might have fallen victim to a spark-related malfunction.

Generally speaking, the Red Planet is a quiet place, largely due to Mars’ low-atmospheric pressure. In fact, it can fall so silent, there was a time the Perseverance team believed the rovers’ mics might be broken.