The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success
About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.
Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.
The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.
So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report