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First sounds of wind on Mars captured by NASA’s Insight Lander
This fresh in from the Elysium Planitia of Mars: the sound of wind from an alien world. On its 10th day as a new resident of the red planet, NASA’s InSight lander’s pressure sensor transmitted air vibration data from its trembling solar panels, representing a steady breeze about 99 million miles away. The combination of photos sent back from the craft with the sound of Martian wind gives Earth residents a unique moment to feel like they’ve joined the craft themselves. “It’s fun to imagine that I’m there,” mused Don Banfield during a JPL media teleconference discussing the recording. Banfield is InSight’s Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem (APSS) Science Lead.
InSight, short for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport”, launched aboard an Atlas V rocket on May 5, 2018 and successfully landed on the Martian surface on November 26, 2018. The craft is a seismic investigator sent to study the red planet’s core, eventually drilling 10-16 feet down into its crust to gather geographical data. The craft’s landing event was live streamed online for viewers around the world, greeting Earthlings with a photo of its new home’s surface shortly after. It sent back more photos of the surrounding area prior to the wind recording.
The thin CO2 atmosphere on Mars doesn’t translate high sounds well, so the recorded vibrations from InSight’s pressure sensor are low on the audio spectrum, under 50 Hz, thus difficult to hear. However, after the frequency was increased by a factor of 100 (raised two octaves), it became possible to hear what sounds like a steady wind blowing across the regolith. Dust devils tracked in the area moving across the Martian surface had motion consistent with the wind recordings, thus confirming what was being heard by InSight’s scientists.
The way InSight picks up and translates sound is similar to how a human ear works: Air pressure vibrates the eardrum, then that vibration pattern is sent through the inner ear bones to the cochlea which has tiny hairs translating the vibrations into electrical signals sent to the brain. InSight’s solar panels are like its eardrums, the spacecraft structure itself like its inner ear, its instruments like its cochlear, and its electronic box translating and transmitting signals is like brain. The “sounds” we hear from Mars are translated data from wind-caused vibrations.
Ironically enough, wind noise is actually not a particularly desired outcome from InSight’s instruments. According to the scientists participating in NASA’s teleconference discussing the event, the inlet for the pressure sensor was specifically designed to minimize any chatter from air movement. Also, the placement of InSight’s seismographic gear will be based on the best area to reduce input from the lander’s interaction with the vibrations it’s recording, i.e., the lander’s movement from seismic events. It should be noted, though, the Martian wind gracing our human ears for the first time is only a taste of what’s to come from InSight’s instruments.
Once the wind and thermal shield (the white dome in the photos) has been lifted from the lander in a few weeks, all of InSight’s instruments will be exposed to the Martian environment for data collection. For now, the lander’s Earth-based team is first focusing on understanding the area the craft is in to pick the best place to set its instruments. After the main mission begins, however, a full study of Mars’ atmosphere will be underway and we could hear, among other natural events, the sounds of exploding meteors.
While wind may be a unique sound to hear on an alien world, it’s not the first time a NASA craft has entertained our ears and imaginations. Electromagnetic vibrations have been recorded all across our solar system, perhaps the most famous of which originated from the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977. The data collected from the craft’s radio-capturing instruments has been converted into audio files – you can even find a full album’s worth of the sounds on a variety of streaming sites. Some of the recordings are meditation-worthy, others a touch unnerving. We humans have additionally added some recordings of our own to space via Voyager’s famous “golden record”, the sounds of which are also available for listening online.
If you’re craving a full Martian soundtrack, you’ll be happy to know that NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is planned to provide just that. It will have two microphones on board, one of which will record the actual landing of the rover. Combined with telemetry data and surface photographs, Mars is on its way to its own documentary with inputs completely provided “on-location”. Stay tuned!
Listen to the Martian wind yourself below:
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SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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Elon Musk
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Elon Musk shared a new Terafab video showing Optimus, Robovans, and a stunningly futuristic campus.
Elon Musk posted a new video of Terafab on X Thursday morning, and the most eye-catching details in it were not the building itself, but two products still awaiting production: Optimus and the Robovan.
The concept render, credited to SpaceX, shows Optimus robots working the grounds of the roughly 2.5-mile-long facility planned for the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, while a Robovan glides along an elevated roadway cutting through the building itself, sharing the frame with a Tesla Semi and a Cybercab.
Robovan is the boxy, driverless people and cargo mover Musk unveiled alongside Cybercab at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024. He pitched it as a way to move up to 20 passengers at once, or handle freight instead, at a target cost he claimed could fall under a dollar a mile, with no steering wheel or pedals, the same layout as Cybercab. Nearly two years later, Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline and has not shown up in any factory footage, which makes Thursday’s render one of the only recent looks at the vehicle in any form.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Optimus has moved further along. Tesla began converting Fremont’s old Model S and Model X assembly line into a Gen 3 Optimus production line earlier this year, and Musk visited the site on July 1 to mark the changeover. A second, larger Optimus plant is under construction at Giga Texas, targeting volume production in summer 2027 and eventual capacity of 10 million units a year. Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this month the robot has “big shoes to fill” in replacing the S and X line, while Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the company’s biggest product of any kind, with a long-term price he has pegged between $20,000 and $30,000.
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Check out the “Robovan” from @Tesla
📸: @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/D4es2i9NUe
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Musk wrote alongside the clip. “And it will be stunningly beautiful.”
One quote post summed up the reaction: “Futuristic scene with RoboVan + Cybercab + Tesla Semi + Optimus.”
Beyond the vehicles, the architecture wrapped around them stands out too. The building’s facade is canted at sharp angles, with illuminated horizontal bands running through what appears to be a multi level interior visible from outside. Below the elevated roadway, pedestrians walk along a plaza next to a reflecting pool, and the skyline behind the campus is dotted with angular spires that read more like sculpture than infrastructure, a departure from the strictly utilitarian look of Gigafactory Texas or Starbase.
The timing tracks with what Terafab representative Riley Trennell told Grimes County residents on Wednesday, when he said renderings of the facility would be released “within days.” Musk’s post followed less than 24 hours later, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent out its own release Thursday confirming the project. As Teslarati reported this morning, Terafab’s tax abatement agreements with Grimes County are now signed and active, and SpaceX has sent the county its first $10 million payment under that deal. The dollar figure tied to this phase of construction, per Reuters, is $16.8 billion, one of the first hard capital expenditure numbers attached to Terafab since Musk unveiled the joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI venture in March.Reaction on X ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical. “God Bless Texas! Everything is bigger and better in Texas!” one reply read. Another was more measured: “Terafab in a decade…..”
Whether the finished building matches the render is a separate question from whether Musk wanted people talking about the render itself. Less than a day after posting, the video had already crossed 5.5 million views.
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Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
