What might we hear on other worlds? A free demonstration programme for planetaria

In order to plan missions with acoustical sensors for other worlds, and to design those instruments appropriately, it is useful to predict the nature of the signals they might detect. Such predictions could, for example, identify in advance that a planned single microphone system should be replaced by a 3-microphone system, because the predictions indicate the dominance of uncorrelated non-acoustic (hydrodynamic) pressure fluctuations that need to be separated from the incident sound, allowing (in addition) its the direction of arrival to be estimated. Similarly, calibration errors could also be predicted resulting from the fluid loading experienced by the off-world microphone, or acoustical artifacts resulting from the presence of coupled waves in the structure supporting the microphone. One offshoot of generating such predictions was the ability to build a software package to provide to planetaria the ability to predict certain environmental sounds on other worlds and entertain the public by changing their voices to reflect how they would sound on another world, if they could speak and live. The interest of the public has always been key to ensuring policymaker support for space and extraplanetary exploration. This should be supported by rigorous science, or where guesses need to be made, these should be transparently communicated. This project endeavoured to do this through the aforementioned software package.