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.
Fourteen years after touching down in Gale Crater, Curiosity is still finding surface details that stop its science team mid-plan. In mid-August 2026, during sols 4988 through 4994, the rover paused among layered rocks on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp and photographed a scatter of broad, shallow pits cut into bedrock. One of them, captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on the end of the robotic arm on sol 4989, measures about a centimeter across and, from certain angles, looks uncomfortably like a small footprint.
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.
Curiosity had been working its way down the Gediz Vallis channel on the flank of Mount Sharp for months. The rover’s wheels left fresh tracks in the loose soil and scattered stones as it hunted for clues about the planet’s ancient past. On May 30, 2024, during the 4,200th Martian day of the mission, one of those wheels rolled over a rock that looked no different from thousands of others nearby. The one-ton machine pressed down, and the stone gave way with a quiet crack that no one on Earth witnessed in real time.