NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hits Marathon Milestone On Fifth Anniversary of Mars Landing

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has just crossed an impressive mark on the Red Planet. It has now driven more than 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers), which is exactly the distance of a full marathon on Earth.

The rover reached this point while checking out some fascinating ancient terrain west of Jezero Crater. Only one other vehicle has ever gone this far on another planet: NASA’s Opportunity rover did it back in 2015. It’s a real achievement after years of tough driving across rocky and uneven ground.

Hunting for Ancient Life

Perseverance touched down on Mars five years ago as the most advanced explorer NASA has ever sent there. The main goal of the Mars 2020 mission is simple yet significant, which is to look for signs that tiny microbes might have lived on Mars long ago.

The Perseverance rover drills into rocks, pulls out slim core samples of rock and loose soil, and stores them carefully. Some day soon, another NASA mission might pick up these samples and bring them back to Earth so scientists can study them in detail.

AI Takes the Wheel

Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover also completed its first-ever drives planned completely by artificial intelligence. On December 8 and 10, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory let the AI system choose safe paths across tricky spots.

Using vision-language models, it looked at the same kind of images and data that human planners normally review. The test worked well and was done with help from Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

Will we have more AI-embedded probes and rovers in the future? Seems likely.

Meanwhile, you can track the NASA rover on Mars here.

See Also: NASA's Perseverance Takes Selfies From ‘Lac de Charmes,' Its Farthest Trek In Mars [WATCH]

Cover: NASA