NASA’s Perseverance rover has broken the record for the distance traveled among all vehicles on another planet, the U.S. space agency reported. UNN writes about this with reference to Engadget.
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The six-wheeled buggy with a nuclear-powered engine had covered 45.22 km by October 11, surpassing NASA’s Opportunity rover, which traveled 45.16 km across the surface of the Red Planet. Perseverance covered this distance in just five and a half years, while Opportunity took nearly 15 years.
Although the 45.22 km it has covered to date may not seem like a particularly great distance, it is quite impressive considering that the vehicle’s maximum speed is only 0.16 km/h. It is also impressive given the difficult terrain it had to navigate, as NASA showed in a video.
The 1,025-kg rover reached this milestone after heading into a region called Idube to study an object called "Lac de Charm" (Lake Charm), featuring one of the oldest landscapes ever explored in our Solar System. "The rocks and terrain of Lac de Charm are so ancient that their terrestrial analogues were eroded away long ago by erosion and plate tectonics (there are no tectonic plates on Mars), and it is in Idube that the science team hopes to find traces of ancient hydrothermal systems," NASA explained.
Perseverance’s longevity is partly explained by the thoughtful navigation decisions made by its AutoNav autonomous system. Using it, the rover can capture images of the terrain and detect hazards in real time, automatically moving between waypoints selected by mission planners. Processing 600,000 measurement points with each view, it has been able to cover more than 90 percent of its total distance autonomously.
Thanks to a recent software update, Perseverance can now lean more and turn less to reduce wear on its components, while simultaneously checking its position against orbital maps as it moves. Next, the team wants to overcome problems with glare from sunlight that obstructs the camera’s view, so that the rover can operate for longer.
Perseverance may have surpassed Opportunity, but the Curiosity rover is also still exploring Mars and has covered 38.15 km to date. Next in terms of distance traveled among U.S. spacecraft are the crewed rovers from the Apollo 16, 17, and 18 missions—with the Apollo 17 rover having covered the greatest distance, 35.74 km.
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