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Perseverance Rover Captures The First Audio Of Mars Ever Recorded

Updated September 5, 2021

Late last week, there's a good chance that you suddenly heard the news that NASA's Perseverance rover had successfully touched down on Mars.

While it would be hard not to immediately panic if someone put us in charge of landing a vehicle on Mars, this landing was considered particularly tricky even by the standards of those who make a living through complicated operations like this. So it's not hard to see why this success was the cause of so much celebration within the scientific community.

And now that the dust has long settled on this landing, we're able to get a better sense of what the Perseverance rover came to the red planet to do. And it's already captured aspects of Mars that we've never experienced before.

On February 18, Perseverance descended towards Mars' Jezero Crater.

As you can see from this video, the rover is outfitted with a sophisticated array of cameras that allowed it to document its own descent.

But while the layperson might get nervous about the fact that it seems to get lost in the dust, what we're seeing is all part of the Herculean task of landing on Mars.

As acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said in a release by the agency, "For those who wonder how you land on Mars – or why it is so difficult – or how cool it would be to do so – you need look no further."

And while it's hardly a new phenomenon to obtain images of Mars through a rover, Perseverance has managed to do it in ways unlike anything we've seen before.

For instance, its setup makes this video — which gives us the first 360 recording of Mars we've seen — possible.

As Thomas Zurbuchen from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate told NBC News, both the video and the audio Perseverance captured brings us "the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit."

In addition to its network of high definition cameras, Perseverance also has two microphones mounted on it.

And while NASA reported that these microphones weren't able to capture any usable audio during the rover's descent — after all, that was probably a pretty noisy affair — it was able to get some natural sounds from the Jezero Crater by February 20.

Considering that the microphones involved were described as "commercial off-the-shelf" devices, it's pretty impressive that they managed to survive the trip at all.

And since that audio has been captured, NASA has released it on SoundCloud.

As Dave Gruel, the lead engineer behind Perseverance's recording capabilities told NBC News, the significant 60-second audio clip captured is underscored by a faint buzzing sound, which is made by the rover itself.

But about 10 seconds in, a slight bumping sound gets picked up and this is apparently the sound of Martian wind. This marks the first time any audio of Mars itself has been transmitted to us.

Fortunately, you don't have to strain too hard if you want to hear this wind in the clip provided here.

That's because NASA has also released a version in which the rover's buzzing is filtered out. Furthermore, it cuts down the 60-second clip to about 18 seconds so the part we're looking for is easier to make out.

You should be able to hear it about five seconds into this clip. And once you do, you'll have heard what Mars sounds like.

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