New Delhi: The Perseverance rover just completed travelling 42.19 km on the surface of Mars, equivalent to a full-scale marathon, according to NASA. After five years and four months of consistently driving across the rocky, red planet, the rover was able to complete the distance and was even photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in June 2026.
Launched in July 2020, Perseverance is the most advanced rover sent by humans to Mars. Its job is to collect rock and soil samples of the planet in search of microbial life. Earlier, in 2012, NASA sent the Curiosity rover, the first-ever Mars rover, which is still working, 14 years later.
While Perseverance completed a marathon on Mars within five years of its landing, Curiosity had taken double the time — almost 11 years — to complete the same journey, said NASA.
Both missions have been sent to different locations on Mars, and although they are similar in size and shape, their objectives and technological tools differ a bit. Curiosity was sent to determine whether Mars was ever habitable, for which it is assessing biological, chemical, climatological and geological conditions.
Perseverance, on the other hand, was sent to answer whether Mars ever had life — this means that it is looking for signatures of biological life on the planet. It also has one major advantage over Curiosity, which is that Perseverance is designed to collect samples from Mars for future analysis, not just analyse them on the surface.
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History of Perseverance
Travelling 42 km over five years might seem less, until you account for the fact that Perseverance is traversing an extremely rocky environment, and collecting samples along the way. In its time on Mars, the rover has provided unique, new insights into the Martian environment, from its rock type to water availability.
One of the most important scientific achievements of Perseverance has been to produce water on the Martian surface, using the Mars-Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment (MOXIE). It converts carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. And Perseverance managed to successfully perform the experiment 16 times, and produced 122 gm of oxygen.
Another reason for the slow movement of the rover across the Mars surface is because it is meticulously collecting samples for future return. According to NASA’s design, Perseverance has been stocked with 38 empty tubes in which it can store important samples from Mars. After drilling rock cores and other soil samples, the rover seals them in titanium tubes and then places them in the sample depot, a location in the Jezero Crater where it initially landed.
However, Perseverance is not trained to bring the samples back with it. It has collected and stored the samples for the possibility of future return to Earth on other Mars missions. According to NASA, neither Curiosity nor Perseverance are designed to come back. Their systems are designed to work in Mars and keep communicating with Earth, until eventual wear-off or failure, or communication loss.
As for the future missions to retrieve Martian samples, they are still being developed and agreed upon. Recently, NASA accepted 41 proposals from commercial space companies for technological innovations for future Mars and Moon missions.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)