NASA's Opportunity Rover Completes Marathon On Mars In Just Over 11 Years

[Eugene]

Source: International Business Times

NASA's Opportunity Rover Completes Marathon On Mars In Just Over 11 Years

By Avaneesh Pandey on March 26 2015 6:39 AM EDT

Not content with exceeding its designated lifespan of three months by over a decade, NASA’s ageing Opportunity rover has set yet another record. The rover has now become the only man-made object to complete a marathon -- a distance of just over 26 miles -- on the surface of another celestial body.

The rover, which has been on the Martian surface since January 2004, completed a distance of 26.2 miles in 11 years and 2 months (or 3,968 Martian days), according to a statement released by NASA on Tuesday. The latest record comes less than a year after Opportunity surpassed the 24-mile distance covered by Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover on the moon in 1973.

“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 statement. “Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool.”

During its 26-mile journey, Opportunity has found a plethora of evidence that the red planet was once a much more habitable place and that it might even have harbored microbial life.

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Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/nasas-opportunity-rover-completes-marathon-mars-just-over-11-years-1860032

[Wounded Bear]

1. K & R...nt

[DreamGypsy]

2. Opportunity beats Paul Ryan's marathon time ...

...by two and a half years...

Paul Ryan Explains Marathon Time Snafu: I Made Up What I Thought Was 'An Ordinary Time':

GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan on Tuesday continued to clean up the mess he made last week when he falsely claimed he had completed a marathon in under 14 years.

"I literally thought that was my time. It was 22 years ago. You forget sorta these things," Ryan said in an interview with Toledo News Now.

In a radio interview before his Republican National Convention speech last week, which was itself heavily criticized for factual deficiencies and outright fabrications, Ryan claimed that when he was younger he had run a "13 year and 50-something" marathon.