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NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently traversing deep space on its journey to Mars, where it will arrive in about three months. But if you want to check in on the rover, NASA has a new way to do it: you can listen to a clip of the audio picked up by its onboard microphone as it navigates space at 26,000 mph.
Perseverance is the first rover to have a microphone on board, and the engineers collected a 60-second audio clip of what it collected on October 19. You can listen to it on SoundCloud or using the link embedded above.
The hissing sound you can hear is the rover’s heat rejection fluid pump, which maintains the rover’s temperature by passing fluid through a heat exchanger. Although sound cannot travel in the vacuum of space, mechanical vibrations can be transferred through the rover’s solid body and be picked up as an electrical signal.
The microphone is included as an experimental attempt to capture the entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence audio when the rover arrives on Mars.
“As great as it is to pick up some audio about spacecraft operations in flight, the audio file has a more important meaning,” said Dave Gruel, chief engineer for the Mars 2020 EDL camera and microphone subsystem in a statement. . “It means our system is working and ready to try and record some of the sound and fury of a Mars landing.”
As this is the first time a microphone has been included in a rover (although it’s not the first time Mars sounds have been recorded), engineers are unsure whether or how much of the landing sequence they will be able to pick up. But they hope for the best.
“Getting the sound from landing is a pleasure, not a need,” Gruel said. “If it doesn’t, it won’t hinder the rover discovery mission at Jezero Crater one bit. If even part of the landing sequence was captured in audio, that would be great. “
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