Skip to main content

How Perseverance is moving faster than any previous Mars rover

NASA’s Perseverance rover is moving across the surface of Mars faster than any rover before. In February the rover broke a 17-year-old record for the longest drive by a rover in a single Martian day, but now it is continuing to speed along toward its new target, the Jezero crater delta.

“Its actual speed is just under a tenth of a mile per hour, but it’s faster than its predecessors,” wrote Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, principal investigator for Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument and co-investigator to its SHERLOC instrument, in a recent blog post about the rover’s progress. “It is making comparatively rapid progress by devoting several hours per day to driving on very smooth terrain.”

The back of the Perseverance rover and its wheel tracks.
Mars Perseverance Sol 388 – Right Navigation Camera: Image acquired on March 24, 2022 (Sol 388) at the local mean solar time of 15:50:05 by the Right Navigation Camera (Navcam), showing the back of the rover and its wheel tracks. Image used with permission by copyright holder

It is the cumulative daily progress that matters most to the rover’s long-term science mission, even more than traveling long distances on individual days, Wiens writes: “Overall, it’s not just the single-day drive that matters; it is more difficult to put together a continuous campaign. That requires enough energy, enough time in the day, and enough data volume to Earth to support next-day drive decisions.”

This is because the science and engineering teams need to look at the data coming from the rover to make decisions about where to send it next. The good news is that “Perseverance seems to have all of that, allowing our team to put together a sustained campaign that has met and exceeded expectations. In one week it has traveled about 1.5 km, effectively a rate of one mile per week.”

Perseverance has traveled a total of more than four miles since it landed in the Jezero crater in February last year. You can see the rover’s full progress so far on NASA’s Perseverance location map, which also shows the current location of the Ingenuity helicopter which traveled along with Perseverance to Mars.

There’s still lots of science left for Perseverance to do, but so far the signs are looking good for the rover to have a long and healthy campaign. When it comes to the speed of its progress, it is already exceeding estimations.

Regarding the rover’s progress so far, “I must admit that I was much more pessimistic,” Weins wrote. “Over the years I have seen many unexpected situations that bedeviled planetary rovers, so I tend to expect the unexpected, having a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude toward new achievements. So I am truly excited to see Perseverance pull off this rapid drive campaign.”

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
NASA’s Mars rover uses its self-driving smarts to navigate toughest route
A composite image showing Perseverance’s path through a dense section of boulders.

A composite image, annotated at JPL using visualization software, showing Perseverance’s path through a dense section of boulders. The pale blue line indicates the course of the center of the front wheel hubs, while darker blue lines show the paths of the rover’s six wheels. NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, has used its self-driving smarts to successfully navigate its most challenging route since arriving on the planet two-and-a-half years ago. Even better, its advanced technology meant it took just a third of the time that it would’ve taken other NASA Mars rovers.

Read more
Perseverance rover’s Mars oxygen machine comes to the end of its mission
Technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover.

The experiment to make oxygen on Mars has come to an end, with the Perseverance rover's MOXIE instrument completing its mission. MOXIE, or Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, is a small box tucked inside the rover that takes in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and converts it into oxygen. After 16 successful runs, the experiment has now been concluded.

Technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Read more
This team of legged robots could be the future of Mars exploration
A team of legged rovers explores a rugged surface.

If you’d been a fly on the wall at the Rockhal concert hall in Luxembourg in September 2022, you’d have been greeted by a strange sight: no bands or cheering crowds in sight, but rather an area filled with 220 tons of lava and rock, with teams of robots crawling across the dusty floor in search of resources.

It was the second and final round of the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Space Resources Challenge, which invited research groups to bring their prototype robots and test out their abilities to prospect for resources in a simulated moon environment. The idea was to look for bright ideas for the next generation of robotic space explorers that could help locate and map lunar resources, such as water, which are essential for future crewed missions.

Read more