Apparently the Perseverance Rover makes quite a racket while driving on Mars terrain. On March 7, NASA released an audio recording of the Rover’s 90-foot ride in the Jezero crater, which was captured by its entry, descent and landing microphone. You hear the wheels of the wheels creaking across the surface of the red planet as it moves, along with the bangs and creases made by the mobility system. As Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, put it: ‘Many people do not realize that the wheels are metal when they see the images. When you ride these wheels on rocks, it is actually very noisy. ‘
It’s so loud that Dave Gruel, the chief engineer for the EDL system, said he would pull out and ask for a rope if he heard these noises while driving his car. The original and unfiltered 16-minute recording contains a loud scratching sound along with the sounds of the driver. While Perseverance’s engineering team is still determining where the high crab is coming from, they are already looking at a few possibilities. The sounds could have been made by the mobility system, or it could have come from electromagnetic interference by one of the Rover’s electronic boxes.
That said, NASA has also released a 90-second version of the sound that filters out the noise:
The Perseverance Rover gives us the first sounds ever recorded on Mars. Apart from this floating sound, another microphone that is part of its SuperCam instrument also recorded Mars blowers and the sound of the instrument’s laser rock. “The variations between Earth and Mars – we visually have a feel for it,” Verma said. “But sound is a whole other dimension: seeing the differences between Earth and Mars and experiencing that environment up close.”