Overview
- An international team reports in Nature that two Martian years of SuperCam audio yielded 55 candidate discharge events, seven showing the complete electromagnetic blip, short ringdown, and acoustic pop signature.
- Correlations with the rover’s MEDA weather station indicate the discharges occurred during dust devils and advancing dust-storm fronts rather than cloud-to-ground lightning.
- Earth-based experiments using an identical SuperCam replicated the same three-part pattern, confirming triboelectric sparks generated by charged dust.
- The vast majority of events were extremely weak and likely non-luminous, consistent with electric fields far below those required for visible lightning in Mars’s thin CO2 atmosphere.
- One unusually energetic event, about 40,000 joules, was likely a discharge from the rover to the ground, highlighting implications for surface chemistry, biosignature preservation, and engineering safeguards on future missions.