Any new sound sent back by the rover is an exciting first, as none of the previous missions to Mars took microphones with them.
As the rover’s six metal wheels move across the surface of Mars, the sounds of rattling, pinging, pounding, and creaking can be heard.
“A lot of people don’t know the wheels are metal when they see the images,” Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover operator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “When you drive on rocks with these wheels, it’s actually really noisy.”
The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located in Pasadena, California, manages the rover mission Perseverance.
The new audio shared by the agency on Wednesday was picked up by a sensitive microphone on the rover during a 100-foot drive on March 7. The same microphone was used during the rover’s successful arrival, descent and landing on February 18 and remains functional.
Two versions of the audio have been shared.
“If I heard these noises driving in my car, I would stop and call for a tug,” Dave Gruel, chief JPL engineer for the rover’s camera and microphone subsystem, said in a statement. “But if you take a moment to think about what you’re hearing and where it’s recorded, it makes perfect sense.”
Since landing, the rover has gone through cash registers for its systems and instruments to ensure Perseverance is ready for a voyage of discovery. The rover looks for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars and collects samples that will be returned to Earth by future missions.
Before Perseverance embarks on its scientific mission, the rover’s journeys were conducted to find a helipad for another part of the mission: the Ingenuity helicopter. The 4-pound helicopter will be the first to fly to another planet.
The rover and helicopter teams have found a suitable place to set up the helicopter. Once released from the rover’s belly, Ingenuity will have to recharge itself using light from the sun and survive the frigid Mars nights before attempting up to five test flights over 31 days.
The first flight will only take about 20 seconds, as Ingenuity is hovering over the helipad, and more flights will be scheduled after the research team receives the data from the first attempt.
Cameras and microphones on Perseverance can capture images, video and sound from these test flights – and the helicopter also has a camera to share aerial photos of Jezero Crater.
Once the Ingenuity experiment is over, Perseverance will really start exploring the old lake bed. And in addition to the images captured by the rover’s 19 cameras, the sound from the two microphones provides a unique perspective on the rover’s journey.
“The variations between Earth and Mars – we have a visual sense for that,” said Verma. “But sound is a completely different dimension: seeing the differences between the Earth and Mars and experiencing that environment better.”