NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has already accomplished tremendous things. But, just days after a dramatic landing in the Martian desert, the rover hasn’t started rumbling great distances around the red planet.
Yet a viral video circulating on Twitter — already viewed 17.1 million times as of Feb. 20 from just one account (there are millions more views elsewhere) — presents a different, bogus story.
The video, which also includes deceiving audio, shows what appears to be panorama imagery captured by the Mars Curiosity rover. This NASA rover landed on Mars in 2012, and has since traveled over 15 miles of rocky terrain. Over the years, Curiosity has captured a plethora of rich, vivid Mars imagery.
For reference, here’s a screenshot of the fake Perservance video. Below it, we describe some of the conspicuous ways we know it’s not from the latest Mars rover mission.
Image: screenshot: twitter
Why it’s not a Perseverance video
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NASA hasn’t instructed Perseverance to drive anywhere yet. The video shows a long trail of rover tracks.
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At the end of the video, you can see “Curiosity” printed on the rover (bottom left).
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NASA also hasn’t instructed Perseverance to lift its mast yet (as of Feb. 20), which holds the high-definition cameras that might capture such imagery.
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Perseverance has microphones to capture Martian sound. The Curiosity rover doesn’t have these microphones. However, around two years ago NASA engineers found a clever way to sense some Martian wind using NASA’s InSight lander. But the sounds in the video have no connection to Curiosity’s imagery.
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The imagery looks like it’s taken on a high ridge. Perseverance intentionally landed in a crater near an ancient river delta, where NASA believes water once existed on Mars.
The Perseverance rover, fitted with extraordinary technology to seek out potential evidence of past microbial life on Mars, has a promising future, whatever it does (or doesn’t) find.
To authentically follow what the rover is up to on social media, avoid random Twitter videos and simply follow NASA’s Perservance account. The agency will avidly follow everything the wheeled robot does. Like many of us, they are thrilled about their latest rover.