Perseverance is hitting the ‘open road’ on Mars like no other rover. On June 19, the six-wheeled explorer officially completed the longest road trip of any robot vehicle on another planet. In a single drive, the rover rolled over 411 meters of Mars‘ rocky surface (more than a quarter mile). Related: Perseverance Found a Zebra-Striped Rock on Mars, And NASA …
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NASA’s Opportunity rover, one of the most successful interplanetary missions in history, came to a dramatic and poignant end in 2019, after 15 years of groundbreaking exploration on Mars. The rover’s final transmission was sent amidst a planet-wide dust storm that left scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) holding onto hope until the very last moment. In …
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Thanks to NASA’s steadfast commitment to blasting robots into space, we now get regular images from another planet beamed back down to Earth. The current generation of Mars rovers began their adventures – finding strange rocks and potentially getting caught up in the center of electrified dust devils, among other important planetary research – in 2012 and 2021. But before …
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