The rocket's space module descent module may still be in the shadow of the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko crater for a very long time, but scientists have only begun to decipher the huge amounts of data that it sent back after a historic landing on November 12.
Now, scientists at the European Space Agency announced the sound they heard when Phil first landed on the dusty surface of a comet.
You have nothing to confuse the sound, not to mention the crash that was heard when the tiny robot came into contact with the comet's core at a distance of half a billion miles. During the 7-hour descent from the Rosetta satellite, the module tool kit (Surface Electrical Sounding and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment) was turned on. During the contact of the module's legs with the comet's surface, one of the instruments, called CASSE (Comet Acoustic Surface Sounding Experiment), recoded the mechanical vibrations from the sensors located in the legs into sound frequencies.
Sound waves cannot propagate through the vacuum environment surrounding the comet, but the vibration transmitted through the hard legs of the landing module can reproduce frequencies that can be heard.
