"It kind of occupies a unique niche between public relations and unique science," said Greg Delory, a research scientist who helped build the microphone at the University of California at Berkeley's Planetary Sciences Laboratory. "It should really raise the level of public interest in the mission."
The polar lander has a stereo camera for eyes, and a sort of nose in the gas analyzer that burns soil samples and "sniffs" them to learn what martian dirt is made of, Delory said. The Mars microphone will be the spacecraft's ears.
Although the microphone is not the first to be sent to another planet, it's signals will be the first to be heard by all the world. The Soviet Union reportedly sent a microphone aboard one of its Venus probes in the 1980s, but nobody outside of a select group of Soviet space agency personnel ever heard those sounds, and no official report has ever been published.
Eager Earthlings listening to the sounds from Mars may hear the whirr of wind -- perhaps even some of the Red Planet's violent dust storms.
And some of its signals may help mission controllers learn how the lander is performing by providing a sort of diagnostic indicator for spacecraft engineers, Delory said. For instance, listening to the sound of solar panels deploying, engineers may be able to tell whether the panels unfold correctly. They will also be able to listen to the sounds of the lander's cameras and hear the robotic arm cut into the crusty layers of the polar surface.
The cracker-size microphone is the first privately-funded instrument to be sent on a planetary mission. Built for less than $100,000, it was funded by the Planetary Society, an international non-profit organization dedicated to the exploration of other worlds and the search for life, according to Louis Friedman, the society's executive director.
"Not only did it cost NASA no money, it cost no mass, no data load and no power draw, because it was all done with what had already been allocated for the Russian instrument," Friedman said. A Russian group that contributed a device to the Mars Polar Lander's scientific instrument package agreed to include the microphone within its allocated payload space.
Although it is not performing any critical science role, Delory said he expects the mic will help scientists learn something startling about the planet.
"Every time we fly a new instrument no matter what it is, we learn something surprising," he said. "We hope to find some sound or some feature that we never imagined. Perhaps we would hear the buzz or hum of electrical discharges in the atmosphere, and for the first time hear thunder on Mars."
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