Afət Ziyadqızı
NASA has announced a historic achievement on the Red Planet. According to the agency, its Perseverance rover had travelled a total of 45.22 kilometres across the Martian surface as of Oct. 11, 2026. The rover, which landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021, surpassed the 45.16-kilometre record set by Opportunity over nearly 15 years in just five and a half years.
The Operative Information Center-OMM reports that Perseverance, which is studying rocks and searching for traces of ancient microbial life in Jezero Crater, has covered more than 90% of its route using an autonomous navigation system. NASA specialists say the rover has the technical capacity to travel a total of 100 kilometres.
The history of robotic vehicles travelling on extraterrestrial surfaces began with the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 1, which covered 10.5 kilometres in 1970, and Lunokhod 2, which travelled 39 kilometres after being sent to the Moon in 1973. Lunar rovers driven by astronauts during the US Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions covered between 26 and 36 kilometres.
Mars exploration has also been shaped by Sojourner, which covered 100 metres in 1997, and Spirit and Opportunity, which travelled 7.73 kilometres and 45.16 kilometres, respectively, after arriving in 2004. China’s Yutu-2 rover, which landed on the far side of the Moon in 2019, has so far covered 1.6 kilometres.
The next major stage in deep-space exploration is planned for 2028. The European Space Agency, with technical support from NASA, aims to send its Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars at the end of 2028. The rover is expected to reach the planet in 2030 and will be able to collect samples from depths of up to two metres below the surface.
NASA’s Dragonfly, scheduled for launch in 2028, is expected to reach Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034 and explore its rugged terrain using a rotor-powered flight system. The Europa Clipper probe, launched in 2024, is due to reach Jupiter in 2030 and study the ocean beneath the icy crust of its moon Europa.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and considered humanity’s most distant spacecraft, continues travelling through interstellar space more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful space observatory, is observing the distant universe from the second Lagrange point, or L2, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
