NASA's Perseverance rover will break the all-time Mars distance record sometime next week, surpassing 45.16 kilometers across the Martian surface. That will push it past the previous record held by the Opportunity rover, which stopped communicating with NASA in 2018.
What makes the milestone more striking is how quickly Perseverance got there. It has driven that distance in roughly a third of the time it took Opportunity.
According to a report by Ars Technica, the key to that speed is the rover's onboard navigation system. Perseverance uses sophisticated cameras to image the surrounding terrain, and an onboard computer then processes those images algorithmically to calculate the safest route forward.
"The real enabling technology has been its auto navigation system," said Steven Lee, the project manager for the Perseverance rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Lee compared the system to self-driving cars on Earth, though Mars presents its own set of challenges. The terrain includes large boulders and sandy slopes. There are no maps, no lanes, and no street signs. On the other hand, Perseverance does not have to deal with other traffic.
The comparison to Curiosity, another rover currently operating on Mars, helps explain just how much the technology has improved. Curiosity launched nine years before Perseverance and carries a similar set of cameras and algorithms. But its onboard computer is a generation older, with some chips dating back to the 1990s. As a result, only about 10 percent of Curiosity's driving is autonomous. In its roughly fifteen years on Mars, Curiosity has covered 38.6 kilometers.
Perseverance's newer computer can process terrain images fast enough to keep the rover moving at a much higher rate of autonomous driving. That speed difference accounts for the gap in total distance despite the much shorter time on the surface.
Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 in Jezero Crater, a site scientists believe was once an ancient lake. The rover has been collecting rock and soil samples for a potential future return to Earth, in addition to racking up kilometers across the Martian surface.
The record will fall sometime next week, according to Lee.
