NASA's Opportunity Mars rover completes the first extraterrestrial marathon

Since arriving on the Red Planet some 11 years ago, the rover has traveled 26.221 miles, just over the distance of a marathon race.

|
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Eleven years and two months after landing on Mars, NASA's Opportunity Mars rover has driven in total further than the length of a marathon race: 26.219 miles (42.195 km.).

NASA's Opportunity rover has completed the first-ever Mars marathon, clocking in with a winning time of 11 years and 2 months.

The golf-cart-size Opportunity rover has now traveled 26.221 miles (42.198 kilometers) since touching down on the Red Planet on Jan. 24, 2004, NASA officials announced today (March 24). The length of a marathon race is 26.219 miles (42.195 km).

"This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world," John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "A first time happens only once." [Inside Opportunity's Record-Setting Mars Marathon (Infographic)]

Opportunity reached the milestone with a 153-foot (46.5 meters) drive today that took it close to a location dubbed Marathon Valley, located on the rim of Endeavour Crater. The six-wheeled robot has been exploring the 14-mile-wide (22 km) crater's western rim since August 2011.

Opportunity adds to its off-world driving record with every turn of its wheels. Second place belongs to the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover, which covered 24.2 miles (39 km) on the moon back in 1973.

"This mission isn't about setting distance records, of course. It's about making scientific discoveries on Mars and inspiring future explorers to achieve even more," Steve Squyres, Opportunity principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said in the same statement. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool."

Opportunity landed three weeks after its twin, Spirit, on a mission to search for signs of past water activity onMars. Both rovers found plenty of such evidence, fundamentally reshaping scientists' understanding of Red Planet history, and the rovers then kept chugging along.

Spirit stopped communicating with Earth after getting bogged down in some loose sand in 2010 and was declared dead a year later. Opportunity remains active, though it has been showing signs of its advanced age. The rover's robotic arm is arthritic, for example, and engineers recently installed a software upgrade to deal with a memory issue that had been afflicting Opportunity since late 2014.

Opportunity is currently studying a small crater called Spirit of St. Louis, which lies just west of Marathon Valley. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted signs of clay minerals, an indication of a wet past environment, in Marathon Valley, and the rover team plans to check out these deposits soon.

Opportunity team members will hold a marathon-length relay race next week at JPL to celebrate the driving milestone, NASA officials said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @SpacedotcomFacebook orGoogle+. Originally published on Space.com.

Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to NASA's Opportunity Mars rover completes the first extraterrestrial marathon
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0325/NASA-s-Opportunity-Mars-rover-completes-the-first-extraterrestrial-marathon
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe