Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

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

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.

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...

How do we know it's not alien lightsaber battles tho?

What are the implications for life?

Strange that the article doesn't say what this means for the formation of life.

Galvanizing!

Does that mean Mars' ground is electrically charged (positively or negatively) or what?

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