Perseverance Has Officially 'Run' a Marathon on Mars
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this photo as Perseverance crossed the 42-kilometer finish line—or is it a starting line?Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA has announced yet another milestone for the Perseverance rover: It's officially traversed the length of a marathon on Mars.
It can't be overstated just how impressive this is. NASA has a policy of underestimating the lifetimes of its projects, often allowing it to claim overdelivery after a mission has been completed on paper. It's a smart policy, but ultimately only really possible because of the nature of space; as long as you don't get unlucky enough to suffer a strike from a small object, the vacuum of space can be quite forgiving to technology.
The surface of Mars, however, is another story. The expectation was always that the planet's dust and windwould make even the projected lifetimes difficult to deliver, that joints would gum up and struts...
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