NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has officially traveled 28.10 miles—farther across another planet’s surface than any other vehicle in history. Not only that, but the six-wheeled science lab accomplished this impressive feat almost entirely autonomously and in barely a third the time it took the previous recordholder.
“The original mission called for no more than 12.4 miles of driving. We’ve blown well past that,” Steven Lee, Perseverance and Curiosity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
Perseverance began operations on Mars on February 18, 2021, after landing in an ancient river delta selected for potential past microbial life called Jezero Crater. Since then, the rover has slowly but steadily made its way across the region, while conducting multiple sediment drilling surveys. These samples are then chemically analyzed using onboard laboratory equipment before the results are sent back to mission specialists at NASA.
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