Listening to Life Beyond the Adelaide Rover

The Adelaide Rover allows us to imagine space exploration through sound. By recording the hums and drones of the Rover, we can start to imagine what exploration might sound like beyond Earth.

Adelaide Rover Team’s rover—Romulus—on Day 3 of the Australian Rover Challenge 2025. Photo by An Nguyen.

My latest project for the Rover Team takes this idea one step further using sound to imagine what life might feel like on Rhea, one of Saturn’s icy moons.

Rhea is a frozen world covered in ice and dust, orbiting deep within Saturn’s magnetosphere. It reflects so much sunlight that its surface is dazzling. Rhea completes an orbit around Saturn every 29.5 years. A year might feel different there. A life form on Rhea might sense time, and the moon’s vibrations, more slowly than us.

I’ve created a series of soundscapes based on what such a being, living within the fractured surface, might feel rather than see. On Rhea, light from the Sun gives way to a soft and silvery Saturn-shine, reflected from Saturn’s cloud tops. Magnetic Fields ripple through the icy surface as does Saturn’s gravity, causing subtle flexing in Rhea’s crust. The reddish organic compounds that form Saturn’s atmosphere, Tholins, gently settle on Rhea’s surface perhaps providing the chemical energy required for life.

To a Rhean organism, these vibrations and energy shifts could form its entire sensory world, its Umwelt.

By transforming field Recordings of the Rover into soundscapes that represent these imagined sensations, the project invites us to listen to life beyond with the Adelaide Rover Team.

What might it feel like to be on another world?

My Soundscapes

My soundscapes for this collection can be found here.