More than 20,000 social media users shared a video that they say is a new, colorful Mars footage with audio. The claim comes after NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which is equipped to record the first video of Mars and the first sound from its surface, begins to explore the planet. The claim is partly false: the reports do show Mars, but the video is a film version of a panoramic photo taken in 2019 by another rover called Curiosity, which was not equipped with microphones, which means the sound is on the image has been processed.
The video in the posts (here, here, here) bakes to show a machine in a rocky, brown landscape. Captions include: “Amazing Mars (Sound on)”; “Fantastic view of Mars with sound!”; “The first images sent to Earth by a rover. Increase the volume and listen to the sound of Mars”; and “26 seconds of incredible color video with sound from the surface of another planet, 128 million kilometers away.”
At least one post (here) was shared before Perseverance even landed on Mars on February 18 (here, mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/).
In the last two seconds of the video, the word ‘Curiosity’ is visible in the lower left corner. The machine and the landscape in this footage were in fact a panoramic photo taken by Curiosity, a rover that landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 (here). The 1.8 billion pixel panorama of the surface of Mars was taken between November 24 and December 1, 2019 and is consistent with the scene shared in the social media posts and can be seen here and here.
The sound edited on the video may not be real, as the NASA website explains that the two microphones that are constantly on board are the first microphones to ever work on the surface of Mars (here, here) . Before perseverance, the only sounds captured from Mars were seismic vibrations in the audible range of the human audience, for example here and here. Reuters could not determine the source of the noise edited after the panorama.
The social media messages appeared before NASA released any video footage of Perseverance. It only released still images, which were published here by Reuters and explained here on NASA’s website. The first video of Perseverance will likely be shared on February 22 at 2:00 PM ET (here , here).
Andrew Good, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Media Relations team, told Reuters in an email that the video in the reports was “definitely a fake” and that NASA could not confirm where the noises came from. . Good confirmed that the audio in the video did not match the audio files of vibrations recorded by Curiosity.
The video of Curiosity’s descent can be seen here.
VERDICT
Partly false. The surface of Mars can be seen in this video, but the reports do not show video recordings with audio captured by the newly landed Perseverance rover in February 2021. Instead, they show a panoramic photo taken by the Curiosity rover with sound processing.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.