NASA's Perseverance rover has clocked 26.2 miles, 42.195 km, across Jezero Crater. That is the exact distance of a marathon, and it makes for a lovely human-scale yardstick for a very non-human feat.
On Earth a marathon is a hard day out for a person. On Mars it is years of careful driving, every metre planned from around 200 million km away. Perseverance has been at it since it landed in 2021, and the distance has stacked up a few hundred metres at a time.
The rover is roughly the size of a small car and runs on a nuclear power source, which is what lets it keep working through the Martian seasons. As it drives, it drills and seals rock cores, samples that are meant to be collected and brought back to Earth on a future mission.
The marathon itself is a milestone rather than a mission goal, but it is a neat measure of how far a robot has driven on another planet while doing real science the whole way. Slow, careful, and effectively unstoppable, which is exactly the temperament you want in a machine you cannot send a repair crew to.
More space on Future Technology: a rocky exoplanet with a detectable atmosphere and dark matter that may come in two flavours.
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