When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft performed its grand finale before plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere, the spacecraft’s Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument detected what the space agency describes as “a powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus.”
NASA engineers later converted these mysterious plasma wave signals into audible sound, producing the ‘whooshing’ sounds you hear in the video above.
NASA calls these rather eerie sounds “surprisingly powerful,” but admittedly, they aren’t well understood by any stretch. The whole point of the RPWS instrument was to provide researchers with a front-row seat to the plasma waves in the hope that researchers could learn more about them.