WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has broken the world record for driving the most distance than any vehicle ever has on the surface of another world.
On Sunday, the rover's odometer reached 28.10 miles, eclipsing the record of 28.06 miles set by NASA's Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018. Perseverance reached the mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity to cover almost 15 years.
The milestone came as Perseverance traveled toward an area called 'Idubi' through the region off the western rim of Jezero Crater nicknamed 'Lac de Charmes,' where the rover is investigating what may be some of the oldest terrain ever explored in the solar system.
Much of the credit belongs to Perseverance's self-driving capability. Using an autonomous navigation system known as AutoNav, the rover images the terrain while rolling, builds a 3D map of hazards, and plots its course between waypoints selected by rover planners on Earth - a capability the team calls 'thinking while driving.'
'The original mission called for no more than 12.4 miles of driving. We've blown well past that, and with all mobility systems fully operational and favorable extended-ground-life test results, we expect Perseverance to keep adding to this record for many years to come,' said Steven Lee, the project manager of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Perseverance is a NASA rover that has been exploring Mars since February 18, 2021, as part of the Mars 2020 mission. Built and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the car-sized rover was launched on July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V rocket and landed in Jezero Crater, a site chosen for its ancient river delta that may preserve evidence of past microbial life.
The rover's main goals are to search for signs of ancient life, study the planet's geology and climate, and collect rock and regolith samples for possible return to Earth by a future mission. Perseverance also tests technologies intended to support later human exploration, including an experiment that successfully produced oxygen from the thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.
Copyright(c) 2026 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
© 2026 AFX News
