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Posted: |
Mar 25, 2015 - 9:22 AM
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By: |
Solium
(Member)
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NASA's Opportunity rover has completed the first-ever Mars marathon, clocking in with a winning time of 11 years and 2 months.
The golf-cart-size Opportunity rover has now traveled 26.221 miles (42.198 kilometers) since touching down on the Red Planet on Jan. 24, 2004, NASA officials announced today (March 24). The length of a marathon race is 26.219 miles (42.195 km).
(No remote rover has traveled as far on another planetary body. This eclipse's a Russian Moon rover which now comes in at a close second.)
"This mission isn't about setting distance records, of course. It's about making scientific discoveries on Mars and inspiring future explorers to achieve even more," Steve Squyres, Opportunity principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said in the same statement. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool."
http://www.space.com/28922-mars-marathon-opportunity-rover.html
The rovers Opportunity and Spirit landed on Mars over 11 years ago. Spirit got caught in a sand trap and went dead in 2010 because it could no longer maneuver and tilt it's solar arrays for power from the sun. Opportunity is still active as noted above. Their original missions were a conservative six months long.
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