On July 27, 2014, which corresponds to the Sol – as in Martian day – 3,735 of its mission, the Mars Rover Opportunity has set the record for the driving distance covered by a human vehicle on another world, reaching 40.25 km (25.01 miles). The previous record belonged to the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover, which in 1973 covered 39 km (24.2 miles) on the Moon.

For the past three years, the Mars Rover Opportunity has been in the area of ​​Endeavour crater and that’s where a little over a year ago it set the record for the driving distance traveled by a NASA vehicle. Currently, it’s heading to Marathon Valley, a site considered interesting because of the presence of clay minerals.

According to calculations made recently, the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover traveled 39 km on the Moon, where it arrived on January 15, 1973. It took less than five months to make its journey, leaving traces that allowed to reconstruct its path using images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) space probe.

The verification of the distance traveled by the rover Lunokhod 2 was carried out thanks to the collaboration between Irina Karachevtseva at Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography’s Extraterrestrial Laboratory in Russia, Brad Jolliff of Washington University in St. Louis, Tim Parker of JPL, and others. In the past, those calculations were approximate but when it was clear that the Mars Rover Opportunity would set the record the matter was taken very seriously.

When the Mars Rover Opportunity was about to establish this new record, the team that runs its mission called Lunokhod 2 a crater with a diameter of about 6 meters (20 feet) on the outer slope of Endeavour’s rim. It’s not exactly the place of the record, but close enough to remember it.

Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the main investigator on NASA’s twin rovers Opportunity and Spirt, believes that the Lunokhod missions achieved great results in the first golden age of planetary exploration, in the 60s’ 70. In his opinion, we’re now in a second golden age and the extraordinary results obtained on Mars were also inspired by those old lunar missions.

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