Fact Check: Sound on Mars from NASA’s Perseverance rover

A video has gone viral on social media of NASA’s rover on Mars capturing a video of the landscape and what is presumably some ambient noise. 

The video was shared by writer James Holland and since then the video has been shared many times, with people claiming it to be footage from the new NASA Perseverance rover.

“Stop everything for 26 seconds and watch this. Footage, with sound (!) from the surface of another planet. Just incredible,” Holland tweeted along with the footage.

However, the original video is from NASA’s previous Curiosity Mars rover, which landed on Mars on August 6, 2012, and was uploaded on the official YouTube page of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on March 4, 2020 and not acquired from the latest mission.

There has been no video footage from the new rover, however, it has already started sending pictures from the Red Planet.

The space research agency described the footage as “a 360-degree panorama of Glen Torridon, a region on the side of Mount Sharp on Mars.”

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“The panorama was taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, when the mission team was out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Since the rover would be sitting still with few other tasks to do while it waited for the team to return and provide its next commands, the rover had a rare chance to image its surroundings several days in a row without moving,” NASA wrote in the description of the video.

“Composed of more than 1,000 images and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the larger version of this composite contains nearly 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape,” the aeronautic body added.