WASHINGTON, June 5, 2026, 12:04 EDT
- NASA’s Perseverance rover has clocked 26.1 miles on Mars—just shy of a full marathon.
- NASA hit the milestone just as it powered down MAVEN, its Mars orbiter that had doubled as a data pipeline for the rovers.
- Perseverance keeps gathering samples, but what happens next—actually getting them back—is still the mission’s biggest unanswered problem.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has nearly covered the length of a marathon on the Martian surface. The most recent update from the agency’s location map places the rover at 26.1 miles—42.01 km—after its latest drive on Sol 1877. That leaves it just shy of a marathon’s official 26.2 miles (42.195 km).
The milestone stands out as Perseverance keeps rolling outside Jezero Crater, marking over five years of activity on Mars. Meanwhile, NASA this week shut down the MAVEN orbiter—one of the key relay points for sending data from surface rovers home. According to NASA, MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) couldn’t be salvaged after contact dropped in December.
Perseverance isn’t just racking up miles. Out in the region west of Jezero, mission scientists are quick to point out: this ground could contain some of the oldest rocks the rover will ever study. For researchers, that’s another shot at glimpsing Mars during wetter epochs—possibly when life, if it showed up at all, had its best shot.
NASA’s rover touched down in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021—a site chosen for its long-dry lake and ancient river delta. The mission: hunt for evidence of past microbial life and gather rock and regolith (that’s dust and shattered stone), potentially for future retrieval back on Earth.
NASA’s map indicates Perseverance hasn’t quite reached the marathon milestone yet, even after a May 20 Reuters piece quoted mission manager Robert Hogg saying he thought the rover would pass that distance within about a month. The official mark still hinges on the upcoming drives.
This stretch has gotten tougher. Last month, NASA reported that Perseverance entered its fifth science phase, the Northern Rim Campaign, making it out to the Lac de Charmes area—farthest west the rover’s gone past the crater. “Wild West,” is how Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described the rover’s current spot beyond the rim. NASA
As of mid-May, NASA reported Perseverance had worked its way through 62 rocks, packed away 27 rock cores inside sample tubes, and rolled nearly 26 miles. Steve Lee, who’s serving as acting Perseverance project manager at JPL, said the team was “almost reached marathon distance,” with the rover still performing well. NASA
That distance places Perseverance among a select group of Mars explorers with real longevity. NASA notes just two American rovers are still operational on Mars: Curiosity, which has been digging into Gale Crater since 2012, and Opportunity, the standard bearer, which logged 28.06 miles before a 2018 dust storm finished its run.
The science comes first—mileage, not so much. Ken Farley, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at Caltech, pointed to a new panoramic image revealing what look like the “oldest rocks” the rover has seen so far. Among them: possible megabreccia, giant shattered chunks blasted free during an ancient impact. NASA
Still, MAVEN’s absence has thinned out the cushion in the relay network. NASA officials told Reuters that losing the orbiter has brought “a slight delay on occasion” when relaying rover data, though they pointed out that four other spacecraft are still maintaining the Mars relay network. Reuters
The bigger risk is this: Perseverance may gather and store the rock samples, but definitive tests for ancient life need labs back on Earth. NASA still calls Mars Sample Return a planned NASA-European Space Agency effort, not a done deal. So for now, the rover’s most important haul is still sitting on Mars.
