Apparently the Perseverance rover makes quite a bit of noise while driving on Mars terrain. NASA released an audio recording of the rover’s 90-meter ride in Jezero Crater on March 7, which was captured with the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) microphone. You can hear the rover’s wheels creaking across the surface of the red planet as it moves, along with the pops and creaks caused by its mobility system. As Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “A lot of people don’t know the wheels are metal when they see the images. When you drive on rocks with these wheels it is actually very noisy. “
It’s so noisy that Dave Gruel, the EDL system chief engineer, said he would stop and call a tug if he heard these noises while driving his car. The 16-minute original and unfiltered recording contains a high-pitched scratch sound along with the sounds of rover driving. While the Perseverance technical team is still figuring out where the high scratching came from, they are already looking at a number of possibilities. The sounds can come from the mobility system or from electromagnetic interference from one of the rover’s electronics boxes.
That said, NASA has also released a 90-second version of the audio that filters out some of the noise:
The Perseverance rover gave us the very first sounds recorded on Mars. Aside from this driving audio, another microphone included in its SuperCam instrument also recorded Martian wind and the sound of the instrument’s laser-zapping rock. “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.”