NASA’s Perseverance rover has officially spent an entire calendar year on Mars, and it has already picked up a major record when it comes to exploring the cosmos. Not only is Perseverance the heaviest rover to ever land on the Martian planet (it weighs roughly 2,260 pounds), but it’s also broken the record for most distance driven by a rover on the Red Planet in a single day.
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On February 14th, just days shy of the rover’s one-year anniversary, Perseverance traveled almost 1,050 feet on the alien service. Furthermore, that entire drive used AutoNav, self-driving software the rover is equipped with that allows it to choose its own path around rocks and Martian obstacles.
Perseverance’s first mission in Mars’ Jezero Crater is nearly complete as it continues taking samples and snapshots of a location scientists believe used to be a lake billions of years ago.
“The samples Perseverance has been collecting will provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Each one is carefully considered for its scientific value.”
“Right now, we take what we know about the age of impact craters on the Moon and extrapolate that to Mars,” added Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Bringing back a sample from this heavily cratered surface in Jezero could provide a tie-point to calibrate the Mars crater dating system independently, instead of relying solely on the lunar one.”
Perseverance has been accompanied by Ingenuity, a helicopter that has provided NASA with additional data. Though it was only intended to fly five times, Ingenuity has successfully completed a whopping 19 flights, allowing researchers to help plot a course for the Perseverance rover across the planet.
As Perseverance continues to rove the planet, NASA researchers continue working on a “fetch rover” that will be sent to retrieve the samples its predecessor has been collecting. With a launch planned for 2026, the earliest those samples would return to Earth would be 2031.
