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A different kind of road trip

NASA’s Perseverance rover reached 28.10 miles of travel on October 11, setting the distance record for a vehicle on another world. The agency announced the milestone the following day.

The record it passed

Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars, with Ingenuity nearby.
Perseverance and Ingenuity on Mars, April 6, 2021. NASA assembled this photographic selfie from 62 camera frames. File image, not the 2026 record drive.Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS · Source · NASA/JPL image use policy

Opportunity had traveled 28.06 miles while exploring Mars between 2004 and 2018. Perseverance reached its new total on the 2,006th Martian day of its mission, after roughly five and a half years. The comparison is about accumulated driving distance, not the length of a single journey.

See the route

NASA has also released an October route animation tracing Perseverance’s progress since its 2021 landing. It provides a way to follow the achievement spatially, rather than treating the odometer as an isolated number.

Keep the claim precise

This is an off-world vehicle-driving record. It is not a spacecraft distance record or a statement about how far anything has traveled through space. That smaller, exact claim is remarkable enough: years of work expressed in a distance many drivers cover before lunch.

Sources & original reportingSource publication or schedule date: October 12, 2026NASA/JPL — Off-world driving record, October 12 ↗NASA — October route animation ↗

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Prepared with AI assistance. Source-based reporting checked on October 23, 2026. This article does not update automatically. Read our editorial standards.