Group To Send Microphone to Mars

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The Planetary Society said the microphone will be included in the French space agency's NetLander mission, which will land four small spacecraft on Mars. The nonprofit group had funded a similar attempt once before, but it ended in failure when the microphone and the NASA spacecraft carrying it were lost.

If successful this time, the group said the member-sponsored microphone would be the first device to return the sounds of another planet to Earth.

``We have seen other worlds and even touched them via robotic senses, but the Mars Microphone will offer humanity the first opportunity to listen to the sounds on the surface of an alien world,' said Louis Friedman, executive director of the 100,000-member space exploration advocacy group.

The group paid for a $100,000 microphone that was part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars Polar Lander mission. That robotic probe, along with the microphone, vanished just before the lander was to set down on Mars in December 1999.

The University of California, Berkeley, developed the microphone for the Planetary Society. It is designed to record whatever sounds exist on Mars, including the crackle of electrical discharges, the rustle of the wind and the spacecraft itself as it operates.

On the NetLander mission, another sensor that will pick up infra-sounds generated at low frequencies will join the microphone.

The Planetary Society microphone is built with largely off-the-shelf parts, including a low-powered speech recognition chip designed by Sensory Inc. of Sunnyvale that is used in electronic toys, TV remote controls, phones and car stereos.

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