That’s because the machine is equipped with a microphone, the first of its kind for Mars exploration devices, that aims to listen to the peeps of a machine called SuperCam It must be deployed once to the surface of Mars. Thanks to it, the device was able to record something else while it was in space.

According to NASA, what you are about to hear was recorded in October (given the distance between the probe and Mars, we have to get used to such delays) “While checking out on board the camera and microphone system that will capture some of Jezero Crater’s landing drama on Mars early next year.”

The high-pitched squeak you hear seems not from an alien spaceship chase Determination Through the darkness of space, nor the sound made by a mysterious interplanetary creature.

Instead, we seem to be listening to both the spaceship itself, as well as the rover’s heat ejection fluid pump, a piece of hardware intended to help maintain the vehicle’s operating temperatures.

“With apologies to the person who came up with the ‘Alien’ logo, I think you could say that in space nobody can hear you screaming, but they can hear your fluid pump to reject the heat,” Dave Grill, Chief Engineer of March 2020, said in a statement Lebanon Electricity Corporation Camera and microphone subsystem.

“The microphone that we included to hear what it’s like to land on Mars was actually able to capture the thermal system of persistence operating in the void of space through mechanical vibration.”

And if you’re wondering how things can be heard in space, given how space and sound don’t like to go through it, the agency has an explanation for that too. Sound waves can travel through solid objects, be picked up by an electrical component, and sometimes transform into an electrical signal. Then some wizards enter, and voila, the rover sound into space.