NASA’s Perseverance rover crossed 28.10 miles on the surface of Mars on October 11, 2026. That figure edged past the 28.06 miles logged by the Opportunity rover, which explored the planet from 2004 until 2018. Perseverance reached the mark on its 2,006th Martian day after roughly five and a half years of operations. Opportunity required nearly fifteen years to cover the same ground.

NASA’s Curiosity rover took the frame on August 11, 2026, at 8:30 in the morning local time on Mars, about an hour after sunrise on sol 4,982. Six shots from the mast camera were stitched into one panorama after the files reached Earth. Mission staff left the usual white balance off, so the morning tint stayed in the file instead of being pushed toward the rusty palette most rover pictures carry.

NASA’s Curiosity has spent so long inside Gale Crater that a round number now feels less like a party than a quiet check of the odometer. On August 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time, the rover reached its 5,000th sol, a Martian day that runs about 39 minutes longer than one on Earth. Parked on a sandy ridge the team calls Chocolatal, in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, it turned its black-and-white navigation cameras on the slope below and took the first half of what NASA later released as a postcard.

Curiosity’s right navigation camera swept across Gale Crater on August 20, 2023, at 22:27:46 UTC and recorded a small dark blot perched on a distant rocky ridge. In the raw grayscale frame from sol 3924 the blot sits far left, a compact dark mass with thin downward extensions that many later viewers read as tentacles. Zoomed and isolated, the form also reads as a miniature combat machine from H.G. Wells. The original NASA file is public and unaltered.

NASA’s Perseverance aimed its SuperCam laser at ordinary looking pale rocks scattered along the rim of Jezero Crater and the returning light carried a clear signature of something never confirmed on Mars before. Chromium bearing corundum showed up in the data, the same crystalline aluminum oxide that forms rubies and sapphires on Earth.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just finished a punishing test campaign on a piece of hardware smaller and lighter than most people would expect for a Mars mission. In July, engineers put a flexible, fabric-based radar antenna through the equivalent of more than two full prime missions of hard landings on the Red Planet. The antenna came through with its signal strength intact.

Curiosity has been climbing the broad valley nicknamed Valle Grande for weeks when its cameras locked onto something that stopped the science team cold. On June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day of the mission, the rover’s Mastcam stitched together eleven frames into a clean panorama of a solitary butte standing roughly 20 feet tall. Mission planners named it Miraflores. A thick layer of dark sand sits on its flat top like a natural crown, while the rock faces below show the slow work of wind and time carving away everything that once surrounded it. That erosion left the butte standing and deepened the valley the rover is now driving through.

NASA has just released a time-lapse video of the Psyche spacecraft approaching Mars, passing within 2,864 miles of the surface, and then pulling away after using the planet’s gravity to gain speed on May 15. The sequence, built from photographs taken over a month, shows Mars as a narrow dazzling crescent that expands and recedes behind the craft. Sunlight scattering through the dusty landscape led the crescent edges to shimmer and spread wider than intended, giving spectators a unique perspective rarely seen in missions.