NASA’s Cassini Listens to Eerie New Sounds of Space Near Jupiter

NASA's Cassini Listens to Eerie New Sounds of Space Near Jupiter

January 4, 2001

Contact:


Guy Webster, JPL, (818) 354-6278

One audio clip produced from radio waves that NASA's Cassini spacecraft
detected near Jupiter was described last week by the Los Angeles Times as
sounding "like a troop of howler monkeys battling underwater." A new audio clip
is available online today from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

(1.9 MB)

Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument detected the waves at
low radio frequencies, which University of Iowa scientists have converted to
sound waves to make the patterns audible. The waves from which the new audio
clip was developed were in the thin solar wind of charged particles that fills
the space between the Sun and its planets. Cassini detected the waves Jan. 1 at
a distance of 10 million kilometers (6.2 million miles) from Jupiter.

Additional information about Cassini-Huygens is online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and
the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini and Galileo missions for
NASA¿s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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