The exploration firsts keep rolling in from NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars.

Perseverance captured audio during a drive on March 7, an unprecedented recording that reveals the many creaks and rattles made by the six-wheeled robot as it rolls over Mars’ famous red dirt.

“A lot of people, when they see the images, don’t appreciate that the wheels are metal,” Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement today (March 17), when the audio was released. “When you’re driving with these wheels on rocks, it’s actually very noisy.”

Perseverance’s entry, descent, and landing (EDL) microphone recorded more than 16 minutes of audio during the March 7 drive, which covered 90 feet (27.3 meters) on the floor of Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, NASA officials said.

The EDL mic has also captured the Martian wind and various whirrings of the rover. It didn’t record audio during Perseverance’s epic touchdown on Feb. 18 as planned, so we’ll just have to make do with the amazing video the rover recorded that day.

source space.com