NASA’s Perseverance Rover Just Set a Marathon Record on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed a marathon on Mars, covering 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers) in five years and four months of driving, less than half the time it took the only other rover to do it. The average human marathoner, for scale, finishes in roughly 4:30.

Perseverance passed the mark on June 14, the 1,890th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, NASA announced in a June 24 image release. One sol earlier, the HiRISE camera aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the rover from orbit, its wheel tracks visible across the terrain, in an area west of Jezero Crater that the mission’s science team calls Arbot.

The first Mars marathon belonged to NASA’s Opportunity rover, which reached the distance on March 24, 2015, after 11 years and two months on the planet. A 153-foot (46.5-meter) drive on its 3,968th sol carried it past 26.2 miles. “This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world,” John Callas, Opportunity’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at the time. “A first time happens only once.”

JPL staff celebrated Opportunity’s milestone in the most literal way available, with a marathon-length relay run around the laboratory in Pasadena.

For all its pace, Perseverance does not yet hold the outright distance record. Opportunity kept driving for four more years after its marathon and had logged 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) by the time NASA declared its mission complete in February 2019, a total that remains the off-Earth driving record. Perseverance’s odometer now sits less than two miles from it.