NASA’s Perseverance rover made the very first audio recording of a vehicle traveling on Mars.
The Mars rover has picked up audio using one of two built-in microphones during a March 7 test drive where the vehicle traveled 30 meters over the surface of Mars.
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The popping, pinging and rattling of the rover’s six wheels moving across the red planet’s terrain can be heard in the more than 16 minutes of unedited audio released to the public on Wednesday.
Hear that? That’s the sound of me driving over Mars rocks. This is the first time we’ve captured sounds while driving on Mars.
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– NASA’s Persistence Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 17, 2021
The audio also includes a high-pitched scraping sound that NASA engineers say could be electromagnetic interference from one of the rover’s electronics boxes or interactions between its mobility system and the planet’s surface. A separate, edited 90 second recording was released to filter out some of the noise.
“A lot of people, when they see the footage, don’t know that the wheels are metal,” said Vandi Verma, senior engineer and rover driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. said“When you drive on rocks with these wheels, it’s actually really noisy.”
The recording is another first for Perseverance, who previously recorded the sound of the Martian wind and the sound of one of his instruments blowing up rocks with a laser to explore their structure and composition. No other rover has ever captured audio from the surface of Mars.
Perseverance landed on Mars last month to begin its two-year mission to roam the planet in search of signs of ancient life. It landed on the planet’s Jezero crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed nearly 4 billion years ago.
The car-sized robotic explorer is equipped with a drill, robotic arm and several other advanced scientific tools to collect rock and dirt samples that will be picked up by a future mission to Mars and returned to Earth.
The rover also has a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which aims to explore Mars by plane. If successful, the plane will be the first of its kind to fly on another planet.
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