Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery on Mars, detecting what appears to be lightning by analyzing the sounds captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover. This revelation was shared by a team led by French researchers, who reported their findings on Wednesday.

The Perseverance rover’s microphone picked up the distinctive crackling of electrical discharges, believed to be “mini lightning” events. Over the course of two Martian years, researchers identified 55 of these occurrences, mostly associated with dust storms and dust devils, which are known for their intense winds.

These electrical discharges, similar to static electricity on Earth, are small, measuring just inches in size. They occurred within close proximity—about 6 feet—of the microphone, which is mounted on the rover’s tall mast. This mast is equipped with cameras and lasers for examining Martian rocks. Amid the sound of howling winds and dust particles pelting the microphone, the sparks from these discharges are distinctly audible.

Baptiste Chide, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, highlighted that scientists have been searching for signs of electrical activity and lightning on Mars for the past 50 years. This discovery marks a significant step forward in understanding the Red Planet’s atmospheric phenomena.

Scientists have been looking for electrical activity and lightning at Mars for half a century, said the study’s lead author Baptiste Chide, of 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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