Perseverance Microphones
Perseverance Microphones
[Megan is sitting in an office chair at a desk, typing on her laptop. The laptop is connected to an audio mixer box on the floor. The box has several buttons and indicators etc. Cueball is standing on the other side of the box, holding an electric guitar ready to play. The guitar is plugged into the box. From the box there is also a wire going to a small pedal on the floor. Cueball has one foot on top of this pedal.] Megan: Perseverance's microphones are active! Downlinking audio! Cueball: I'm ready with the looper pedal.
[Caption below the panel:] The first Mars sample return

This comic is a play on dual meanings of the word "sample". The day before this comic was published, NASA successfully landed a new rover, Perseverance , on Mars; part of its mission is to drill and scoop Martian rock and dust from the surface, store it in tubes, and leave them on the surface for collection by a future mission which will return them to Earth. If successful, this would be the "first Mars sample return" in history.
“ Samples ” can also refer to short snippets of recorded sound used in music. Perseverance is the first Mars mission to land on Mars with microphones too, so it would be possible to use audio samples from those microphones musically, e.g. using a looper pedal , which lets a musician play short samples of music and then repeats them back live as if it were another musician. Using a loop pedal would make sense if the sample includes a tune that repeats throughout the song—or that could repeat throughout the song. This is similar to 411: Techno .
The joke is that these audio samples, as opposed to rock samples, would be "the first Mars sample return." Additionally, the comic might be a reference to Samples from Mars , a company that sells sampled audio from older instruments for digital music production.
The title text anthropomorphises the rover, suggesting that the drop to the surface was so frightening for it that it was screaming as it descends.
The period between entry into the Martian atmosphere and touchdown on its surface has been dubbed the "Seven Minutes Of Terror", mainly for the terror felt by the mission controllers on Earth, rather than the lander, as they are unable to make any useful corrections to a craft that is hundreds of millions of miles/kilometres away. The round-trip communication delay significantly exceeds the whole of the passage through the thin atmosphere, so they have to rely on whatever pre-arranged autonomy they engineered and programmed into their craft beforehand, and hope they anticipated all eventualities .
You can view the landing here .
The landing was the topic of the next comic 2428: Mars Landing Video .
[Megan is sitting in an office chair at a desk, typing on her laptop. The laptop is connected to an audio mixer box on the floor. The box has several buttons and indicators etc. Cueball is standing on the other side of the box, holding an electric guitar ready to play. The guitar is plugged into the box. From the box there is also a wire going to a small pedal on the floor. Cueball has one foot on top of this pedal.] Megan: Perseverance's microphones are active! Downlinking audio! Cueball: I'm ready with the looper pedal.
[Caption below the panel:] The first Mars sample return
