Opportunity rover breaks NASA’s 40-year-old roving record

NASA’s legendary Opportunity rover has broken a 40-year-old extraterrestrial distance record after nine years of hard Mars exploration.

The tenacious six-wheeled robot has now travelled a record distance of 35.760 kilometre since landing on the red planet in 2004.

The team operating Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars that the rover drove 80 meters on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars to 35.760 kilometres, NASA said in a statement.

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth’s Moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission’s Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles or 35.744 kilometres.

That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until this new milestone.

“The record we established with a roving vehicle was made to be broken, and I’m excited and proud to be able to pass the torch to Opportunity,” Cernan said.

The international record for driving distance on another world is still held by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which travelled 37 kilometres on the surface of Moon in 1973.

Opportunity began a multi-week trek last week from an area where it has been working since mid-2011, the “Cape York” segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater, to an area about 2.2 kilometres away, “Solander Point.”