November 27, 2025 / 4:31 PM EST / CBS/AP
Scientists say they have detected what appears to be lightning on Mars by listening to sounds recorded by a microphone on NASA’s Perseverance rover. A French-led team reported Wednesday that the rover’s microphone captured the crackling of electrical discharges.
The researchers documented 55 episodes of “mini lightning” over two Martian years, almost all occurring during the windiest sols — during dust storms and dust devils. The electrical arcs were just inches in size and took place within about 6 feet of the microphone mounted on the rover’s tall mast, part of the system used to examine Martian rocks with cameras and lasers. Sparks from the discharges, similar to static electricity on Earth, are audible amid noisy wind gusts and dust striking the microphone.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped a picture of Mars on Aug. 27, 2003. (NASA/Handout via Reuters)
Scientists have searched for electrical activity and lightning on Mars for roughly 50 years, said lead author Baptiste Chide of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse. Chide said the discovery “opens a completely new field of investigation for Mars science,” noting possible chemical effects from electrical discharges and calling it “like finding a missing piece of the puzzle.”
The evidence is persuasive but rests on a single instrument that was designed primarily to record laser zaps used to study rocks, not lightning, said Cardiff University’s Daniel Mitchard, who was not involved in the study. He noted the discharges were heard rather than visually observed. “It really is a chance discovery to hear something else going on nearby, and everything points to this being Martian lightning,” Mitchard wrote in an accompanying Nature article. Still, he said some debate may persist until additional instruments can verify the findings.
Lightning has been confirmed on Jupiter and Saturn, and Mars has long been suspected of producing electrical discharges. To search for signals, Chide and his team analyzed 28 hours of Perseverance recordings, identifying episodes of mini lightning using both acoustic and electric signatures. Discharges triggered by fast-moving dust devils lasted only a few seconds, while those from dust storms continued for as long as 30 minutes.
“It’s like a thunderstorm on Earth, but barely visible with a naked eye and with plenty of faint zaps,” Chide said, noting that Mars’ thin, CO2-rich atmosphere absorbs much of the sound, making some zaps faint.
Mars’ atmosphere may be especially prone to electrical discharging because contact among grains of dust and sand generates charge. Mitchard wrote in Nature that while the evidence suggests it’s extremely unlikely the first human to walk on Mars would be struck by a lightning bolt, “small and frequent static-like discharges could prove problematic for sensitive equipment.”
Perseverance has transmitted other Martian sounds before, including wheel crunches and the whir of the Ingenuity helicopter. The rover has been exploring a dry river delta since 2021, collecting rock core samples that could show traces of ancient microscopic life. NASA plans to return those core samples to Earth, though the campaign is on indefinite hold while the agency seeks less costly options.
Earlier this month, Blue Origin launched a New Glenn rocket carrying two small NASA satellites, Blue and Gold, which are on a long, looping trajectory to Mars as part of the ESCAPADE mission (Escape, Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers). Managed by the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, the twin probes aim to study how the sun has stripped away Mars’ once-thicker atmosphere. The spacecraft will use a November 2027 flyby of Earth for a gravity assist, then head toward Mars, arriving in September 2027. They will spend a year in an initial kidney-shaped orbit beyond the moon and another 10 months in transit.
Mars once had a global magnetic field like Earth’s, powered by a molten core. That field largely froze long ago, leaving isolated magnetic remnants. Without a global protective field, Mars’ atmosphere has been vulnerable to erosion by high-speed electrons and protons from the sun and charged particles from solar storms.
William Harwood contributed to this report.
