NASA's Perseverance Rover Surpasses Opportunity to Claim Off-World Driving Record

Key facts

• NASA's Perseverance Mars rover set a new off-world driving record on October 11, 2026, when its odometer reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), surpassing the 28.06-mile (45.16-kilometer) record of the Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018.
• Perseverance achieved the record on the 2,006th Martian day (sol) of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity almost 15 years.
• The milestone occurred as Perseverance traveled toward an area called 'Idubi' in the region nicknamed 'Lac de Charmes' off the western rim of Jezero Crater, where scientists hope to find traces of ancient hydrothermal systems in some of the oldest terrain explored in the solar system.
• Perseverance's self-driving capability, AutoNav, builds 3D hazard maps and plots courses autonomously, with the rover driving over 90% of its total distance using AutoNav compared with about 5% for Opportunity and Spirit, and processing 600,000 measurement points per look versus 20 for Sojourner.
• NASA approved the mission's first extension, which began in October 2026 and will carry Perseverance's exploration of the crater rim through roughly the end of 2028.
• Earlier NASA Mars rovers include Sojourner, which covered about 330 feet (100 meters) in 1997; Spirit, which logged 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers) before ending in 2010; and Curiosity, which landed in Gale Crater in 2012 and has driven more than 23.65 miles (38.07 kilometers).
• Perseverance also surpassed the lunar driving records of Apollo 17 astronauts (22.2 miles/35.7 kilometers in 1972) and the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover (24.2 miles/39 kilometers in 1973).
• Perseverance has collected 29 rock and regolith samples spanning the crater floor, a delta fan, and the crater rim, and previously found a potential biosignature at a rock called 'Cheyava Falls'.
• After Lac de Charmes, the rover will head south along the crater rim toward Rainbow Falls, a 328-foot-wide (100-meter-wide) block of ancient crust uplifted by the impact that created Jezero.