Says a video captures sound from the surface of Mars

When it landed on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover made history as the first equipped to capture sound from the planet. 

But a video shared thousands of times recently on social media is being misrepresented as a feed from Perseverance with sounds that were recorded on Mars’ surface. 

“The first images sent to Earth by a rover,” one post reads. “Turn up the volume and listen to the sound of Mars.”

“Amazing Mars (Sound On),” another says.

The posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

While the images in the clip are from Mars, the video is a film version of a panoramic photograph that was taken in 2019 by another rover called Curiosity, which landed on the planet in 2012. The word “Curiosity” is visible in the bottom left-hand corner near the end of the clip.

Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover doesn’t have microphones, and the sound effects were edited in.

The 1.8-billion pixel panorama of the surface of Mars was taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, and was identified by NASA as the source of the clip’s imagery. The space agency told the Associated Press that Curiosity doesn’t have any sound from Mars.

NASA has picked up seismic vibrations from the planet in the past, but said it hasn’t yet recorded sounds from the surface using microphones. 

These posts are False.