On Monday NASA announced a new world record set by their Mars Opportunity Rover, which has spent over ten years on the Red Planet. Opportunity has accumulated over 25 miles of driving distance on Mars' surface, yielding a number of discoveries for NASA scientists.
After Opportunity traveled 127 feet on Sunday, its odometer read 25.01 miles (40.25 kilometers), which is now (two miles greater than) the off-world driving record for spacecraft. The previous record holder was the USSR's Lunokhod 2 that landed on the moon in 1973 and spent four months exploring its surface for 37 kilometers (23 miles). NASA scientists were likely not cognizant of the record due to the delayed announcement of Opportunity's milestone.
Opportunity's mission objectives include searching for and characterizing rocks and soils, exploring areas on Mars that may have contained water at some point, and providing high-resolution images of the investigations to NASA scientists. Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit (which operated from 2004-2010), are equipped with a panoramic camera, Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer, Mössbauer Spectrometer, Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, magnets, Microscopic Imager, and Rock Abrasion Tool to gather the information that is desired.
The goal for both of these rover missions was for each to travel 40 meters per day and accumulate one kilometer of exploration. The Spirit rover racked up 4.8 miles before its last communication was sent back to Earth on March 22, 2010. The mission goals have far been exceeded and scientists are looking further ahead to explore more parts of Mars to gather as much information as possible before the Mars One missions send humans to the Red Planet within the next 15-20 years. The $800 million cost of the two rovers back in the early 2000s has proved its worth and more.
"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in this NASA news release. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance."
Opportunity is continuing its exploration of Mars with the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012 and has traveled just over three miles. Opportunity is currently traveling in the south of Mars along the west rim of Endeavour Crater to determine if there is a presence of aluminum-hydroxyl clay minerals and will hopefully provide more discoveries before its time is up.
You can read more about Opportunity's new world record in this Fox News article.
