Outer Space ✰☽

UPDATE (20 Aug 2015): What made the comet sing? Scientists working on Rosetta's RPC instrument have found out why 67P/C-G was singing. Via http://wp.me/p46DHN-1nN
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ORIGINAL Citation (Oct 2014): Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording. This sonification of the RPC-Mag data was compiled by German composer Manuel Senfft (www.tagirijus.de).  Read full details in ESA's Rosetta blog: http://wp.me/p46DHN-Li 

Copyright Notice

Original Data Credit: ESA/Rosetta/RPC/RPC-MAG
Sonification: TU Braunschweig/IGEP/Manuel Senfft, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Thumbnail image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

A Singing Comet

An exploration of the sounds of space exploration - made here on Earth. ESA's ESTEC facility is where spacecraft are prepared for travel.

Here are sounds recorded of prototypes of ESA's upcoming ExoMars rover, made in the Planetary Robotics Lab. This includes sounds as we would actually hear them (albeit in Earth atmosphere), as the rover prototype tests its wheels and disembarks from the lander mock-up and traverses some simulated Martian gravel.

It also includes some electro-magnetic radiation, converted to audible sound. 

In addition, I've included sounds of the popping of nitrogen valves from the Materials & Electrical Components Laboratory, involved in a materials test.

The microphones used for this recording are specially made by Slovakia's Jonáš Gruska (LOM Label). Audible spectrum recordings are made with Uši; EMF recordings with Elektrosluch.

These were produced in November 2016 as part of a collaboration with the European Space Agency and TEDxESA. They're CC for a reason - we hope you'll remix and reuse them!

Credit: Peter Kirn/CDM/ESA CC BY-SA

Outer Space ✰☽

George Zones