---
title: "Chinese Rover Sends Video, Audio Back From Mars"
description: "The Chinese rover Zhurong sent footage of its descent along with a video of its drive off of the Tianwen-1 landing platform on Sunday."
date: "2021-06-27"
modified: "2021-06-27"
authors:
  - name: "Tony Ho Tran"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/ttran"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-rover-video-audio-mars"
categories:
  - "Astronomy"
  - "Mars"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "china"
  - "mars"
  - "the digest"
  - "zhurong"
---

# Chinese Rover Sends Video, Audio Back From Mars

![The Chinese rover Zhurong sent footage of its descent along with a video of its drive off of the Tianwen-1 landing platform on Sunday.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/zhurong-deployment-1.jpg>)
*China National Space Administration \<em\>Image: China National Space Administration\</em\>*

## Zhurong Has Landed

China's Mars rover has beamed back its first video and audio from the Red Planet's Utopia Planitia region.

The Chinese rover Zhurong sent footage of its descent — which included deployment of its supersonic disk-gap-band parachute — along with a video of its drive off of the Tianwen-1 landing platform on Sunday, [according to *Space.com*](<https://www.space.com/china-mars-rover-zhurong-first-sounds-video>)*.* The latter video included sounds captured by the rover's climate station, which has a microphone to be used to capture the sounds of martian wind.

Here’s the video of its parachute deployment and descent:

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1409020026619891712

And here’s the video (with sound) of Zhurong driving off of the lander:

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1409021283891879938

## Sound Sources

The sound you hear in the second video might seem like a massive alien tripod emerging from the ground in order to vaporize Tom Cruise's neighborhood, but it's actually the metal-on-metal noise of the rover rotating.

"In fact the sounds were made when the pinion of the Mars rover rotates on the rack, or say the clashing sounds between metals," said Jia Yang, the Tianwen-1 lander deputy chief designer with the China National Space Administration, [in a video released by Beijing](<https://www.cctvplus.com/news/20210627/8206799.shtml#!language=1>).

## Percy Got There First

Though the video and audio captured by the Chinese rover is no doubt momentous, Zhurong isn't the first to send back similar recordings of the martian surface.

NASA's own Perseverance rover beamed back video along with [the first ever audio recordings of the Red Planet](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-releases-first-recordings-sound-mars>) after it landed in February. You can take a listen to that below:

https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/1363937472971907072

In any case, it's amazing that nations are stepping up their space exploration efforts in such a big way. The more footage and data we can gather from Mars means we get that much closer to being able to get humans to land on it, and — eventually — to colonizing the planet.

**READ MORE:** [Hear the 1st sounds from China’s Mars rover Zhurong and watch it drive in new video](<https://www.space.com/china-mars-rover-zhurong-first-sounds-video>) \[*Space.com*\]

**More on Zhurong:** [*Check Out This Huge Hole that China’s Mars Rover Blasted into the Ground While Landing*](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/huge-hole-china-mars-rover>)

## Author
Tony Tran is a former reporter for Futurism, and now an editor at the Daily Beast. His work has been seen in Playboy, HuffPost, Narratively, and wherever else fine writing is published. He lives in Chicago where he frequently plans tabletop gaming sessions for his friends.