NASA says its Mars rover Opportunity has another record accomplishment to add to its resume, having broken the distance record for off-Earth driving.
Opportunity, which arrived on Mars in 2004, has racked up 25 miles of driving to break the record previously held by a Lunokhod 2 vehicle the Soviet Union put on the moon's surface in 1973.
"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," says Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance."
Opportunity's odometer hit 25.01 miles on July 27 following a drive covering 157 feet southward on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where it has been conducting science since arriving at there in 2011.
The Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover, one of two Lunokhod missions, drove 24.2 miles in five months after its January 1973 moon landing.
Opportunity and its rover twin Spirit landed in January 2004 at different points on Mars for what was intended as a 3-month mission to look for signs of past water activity on the planet.
Both found such evidence, then they kept going, showing endurance that surprised and pleased NASA scientists.
While Spirit finally ceased sending data to Earth in 2010, Opportunity shows an Energizer Bunny-like ability to just keep going.
In announcing Opportunity's record drive, scientists were quick to praise the ground-breaking accomplishments of the Soviet moon rovers.
"The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and '70s," says Spirit and Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.
"We're in a second golden age now, and what we've tried to do on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity has been very much inspired by the accomplishments of the Lunokhod team on the moon so many years ago," he says. "It has been a real honor to follow in their historical wheel tracks."
As Opportunity began to approach the driving mark earlier this year the NASA rover team honored the Soviet craft by naming a small crater on Endeavour's outer rim Lunokhod 2.
Opportunity is still in good health, and is likely to add more to its new driving accomplishment, the team says.
"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," Callas says.
