CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Researchers have uncovered what they suspect is lightning on Mars, thanks to the sounds of tumultuous winds captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The rover’s microphone, part of a project spearheaded by a French team, picked up the distinctive crackle of electrical discharges, as revealed in their findings on Wednesday.

Over the course of two Martian years, the team identified 55 occurrences of what they describe as “mini lightning.” These incidents predominantly happened during dust storms and dust devils, aligning with the planet’s windiest days, known as sols.

These diminutive electrical arcs, roughly a few inches (centimeters) in size, appeared within a 6-foot (2-meter) radius of the microphone, which is mounted on the rover’s high mast. This setup is designed to examine Martian rocks using cameras and lasers. Amid the clamor of wind and dust hitting the microphone, the sparks from these discharges—similar to static electricity on Earth—are distinctly audible.

Efforts to detect electrical phenomena and lightning on Mars have been ongoing for fifty years, notes Baptiste Chide, the study’s lead author from the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse.

“It opens a completely new field of investigation for Mars science,” Chide said, citing the possible chemical effects from electrical discharges. “It’s like finding a missing piece of the puzzle.”

The evidence is strong and persuasive, but it’s based on a single instrument that was meant to record the rover zapping rocks with lasers, not lightning blasts, said Cardiff University’s Daniel Mitchard, who was not involved in the study. What’s more, he noted in an article accompanying the study in the journal Nature, the electrical discharges were heard — not seen.

“It really is a chance discovery to hear something else going on nearby, and everything points to this being Martian lightning,” Mitchard said in an email. But until new instruments are sent to verify the findings, “I think there will still be a debate from some scientists as to whether this really was lightning.”

Lightning has already been confirmed on Jupiter and Saturn, and Mars has long been suspected of having it too.

To find it, Chide and his team analyzed 28 hours of Perseverance recordings, documenting episodes of “mini lightning” based on acoustic and electric signals.

Electrical discharges generated by the fast-moving dust devils lasted just a few seconds, while those spawned by dust storms lingered as long as 30 minutes.

“It’s like a thunderstorm on Earth, but barely visible with a naked eye and with plenty of faint zaps,” Chide said in an email. He noted that the thin, carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere absorbs much of the sound, making some of the zaps barely perceptible.

Mars’ atmosphere is more prone than Earth’s to electrical discharging and sparking through contact among grains of dust and sand, according to Chide.

“The current evidence suggests it is extremely unlikely that the first person to walk on Mars could, as they plant a flag on the surface, be struck down by a bolt of lightning,” Mitchard wrote in Nature. But the “small and frequent static-like discharges could prove problematic for sensitive equipment.”

These aren’t the first Mars sounds transmitted by Perseverance. Earthlings have listened in to the rover’s wheels crunching over the Martian surface and the whirring blades of its no-longer-flying helicopter sidekick, Ingenuity.

Perseverance has been scouring a dry river delta at Mars since 2021, collecting samples of rock for possible signs of ancient microscopic life. NASA plans to return these core samples to Earth for laboratory analysis, but the delivery is on indefinite hold as the space agency pursues cheaper options.

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