NASA's Perseverance Rover Completes a Full Mars Marathon in Just 5 Years
There’s a quiet tension in every rover mission to Mars: the Red Planet is vast, the terrain is punishing, and even at top speed these robotic explorers crawl along at barely a tenth of a mile per hour. So when NASA announced this week that Perseverance had officially logged 26.2 miles — a full marathon distance — on the surface of Mars, the number carried more weight than a simple odometer reading ever could.