Our scarlet neighbour is a hub of activity at the moment given the recent arrival of NASA’s Perseverance (along with its drone Ingenuity) and China’s Zhurong rover.

We’re looking at the latter today as at the weekend China released audio captured during Zhurong’s landing on Mars.

We weren’t expecting the voice of an extraterrestrial to pop up but the mechanic whirring of wheels and instruments really reminds us of Michael Bay’s Transformers.

As the video explains, most of what you are hearing is the wheels of the rover meeting the ramp it descended from and the sound of the wheels on Martian ground.

While Zhurong doesn’t have a drone like NASA’s rover, it does have a wireless camera onboard, or rather it did. The rover reportedly dropped the camera off so that it could snap the photos of the lander and the rover together.

We have to give the China National Space Administration props for that rather clever idea. Sure, it’s not 62 images individually stitched together to make an image the likes of which Perseverance takes, but China’s solution is actually beautiful in its simplicity.

The other really interesting factoid about this mission is how China is relaying information to Earth. According to Space News, the Tianwen-1 module Zhurong arrived in is still orbiting Mars and passes over the Utopia Planitia (where Zhurong is located) once per sol (a Martian day). Essentially, Tianwen-1 is serving as a data relay which is a great way of recycling tech.

You can find a few more interesting videos of Zhurong in this Twitter thread. The thread includes video of Zhurong’s descent as well as the audio above and footage of the rover driving away after dropping its camera off.

Huge Zhurong update: Here's full footage of the Zhurong rover's EDL, showing parachute deployment, backshell separation, and landing, including very cool hover during hazard avoidance phase. [CNSA/PEC] pic.twitter.com/iWUXrFKf40

— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) June 27, 2021