What were the two primary purposes for playing pre-recorded audio clips during mission updates?

To make technical data relatable to the public and offer emotional resonance/narrative closure

The practice of overlaying pre-recorded audio—often human voices—onto technical status reports served a dual function aimed at the Earth-bound audience. First, it acted as an accessible tool, translating the abstract technical details concerning the robot’s health, such as battery life or system status, into something the general public could easily digest. Second, these carefully chosen audio clips provided an emotional anchor or narrative structure to the mission's progress and conclusion, offering a satisfying, relatable form of closure even though the physical rover itself remained purely an executing code base.