# Perseverance breaks Mars distance record by driving itself 90% of the time

> On 11 October, NASA's rover raised its total distance travelled on Mars to 45.22 kilometres, IEEE Spectrum reports.

Published on 2026-10-13

A Mars rover has set a new record. According to IEEE Spectrum, it owes much of it to the far greater autonomy with which Perseverance drives itself compared with its predecessors.

The previous record holder, Opportunity, covered 45.16 kilometres. A planet-wide dust storm brought it to a halt in a place named Perseverance Valley.

According to Mark Maimone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Opportunity and Curiosity drove autonomously only about 5% of the time. Perseverance is the first Mars rover to drive itself 90% of the time.

At the end of last year, the team gave Claude, Anthropic's AI, the task of preparing a 400-metre route. The AI examined images taken from orbit and proposed an itinerary.

Humans stayed in control, Mark Maimone says: the team checked the route and made a few adjustments to it.

## Sources

- [IEEE Spectrum (Robotics)](https://spectrum.ieee.org/mars-rover-distance-record)

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