Think self-driving cars are impressive? Try a self-driving rover on a planet over a hundred million miles away.
On Wednesday, NASA announced that its Mars Perseverance rover had pulled off a stunning feat of endurance and self-sufficiency. Over the course of four hours and 24 minutes, the intrepid little robot managed to traverse 1,350.7 feet, or about a quarter mile. It’s the most any Mars explorer has traveled in a single Martian day — or “sol,” in the lingo — and it did it pretty much on its own.
That’s because the rover is largely autonomous. The human scientists choose its destinations, but the bot’s navigation software charts its actual course.
“Engineers at [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] meticulously plan each day of the rover’s activities on Mars,” NASA explained in a statement. “But once the rover starts driving, it’s on its own and sometimes has to react to unexpected obstacles in the terrain.”
One navigation tool is Enhanced Autonomous Navigation, or ENav, which can scan for potential obstacles and hazards up to 50 feet ahead of the rover, which is farther in advance than previous Mars robots, and automatically plan around them.
“More than 90 percent of Perseverance’s journey has relied on autonomous driving, making it possible to quickly collect a diverse range of samples,” said Hiro Ono, a JPL autonomy researcher and lead author of a new paper published in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics describing ENav, said in the NASA statement.
A video captured by the rover’s navigation cameras shows its epic journey, which took place on June 19, 2025. The images were taken every 16 feet for the first third of the journey, and every 3.3 for the final two thirds, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and then combined with virtual frames which were created by reconstructing using the rover’s detailed data in a computer environment.
The distance feat comes as the Mars Perseverance rover reaches another milestone. After nearly five years of roaming the Red Planet, it’s now traveled almost 25 miles. With the help of autonomous software, JPL scientists hope that the rover will amble on at least another 37 miles more.
“As humans go to the Moon and even Mars in the future, long-range autonomous driving will become more critical to exploring these worlds,” Ono said.
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