Every new sound sent back by the rover is an interesting bonus, as none of the previous missions to Mars carried microphones.
As the six metal wheels of the rover move on the Martian surface, the sound of rattling, pinging, banging and cracking is heard.
“A lot of people, when they see the pictures, they don’t appreciate that the wheels are metallic,” Vandi Verma, chief engineer and rover driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “When you drive with these wheels on rocks, it’s actually very noisy.”
The agency’s jet propulsion laboratory, located in Pasadena, California, manages the Perseverance rover mission.
The new sound distributed by the agency on Wednesday was picked up by a sensitive microphone on the rover during a 90-foot drive on March 7. The same microphone was used during the successful entry, descent and landing of the rover on February 18 and remains operational.
Two versions of the sound were shared.
“If I heard these sounds driving my car, I would pass by and ask for a tow,” Dave Gruel, JPL’s engineer for the rover’s camera and microphone subsystem, said in a statement. “But if you need a minute to consider what you hear and where it was recorded, it makes perfect sense.”
Since landing, the rover has gone through the houses for its systems and tools to ensure that Perseverance is ready for a journey of discovery. The rover will look for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars and collect evidence that will be returned to Earth by future missions.
Before Perseverance began its scientific mission, the rover’s vehicles were made to find a heliport for another component of the mission: the ingenuity helicopter. The 4-kilogram helicopter will be the first to fly to another planet.
Rover and helicopter crews found a suitable place to place the helicopter. Once the ingenuity is released from the rover’s belly, it will have to charge using sunlight and survive the icy Martian nights before attempting up to five test flights over 31 days.
The first flight will take only about 20 seconds, as ingenuity glides over its heliport and more flights will be scheduled after the research team has data from the first attempt.
Perseverance cameras and microphones will be able to capture images, videos and sounds of these test flights – and the helicopter also has a camera to share aerial views of Jezero Crater.
Once the ingenuity experiment is over, Perseverance will truly begin to explore the old white of the lake. And along with the images captured by the rover’s 19 cameras, the sound from its two microphones will provide a unique perspective on the rover’s journey.
“Variations between Earth and Mars – we have a visual feeling for that,” Verma said. “But sound is a whole different dimension: let’s see the differences between Earth and Mars and experience that environment more closely.”