Mars rover Opportunity breaks NASA record for off-world driving

Curiosity may be NASA's most popular roving robot, but last week the Mars rover Opportunity brought its total trip odometer up to 22.22 miles -- the longest distance ever traveled by a NASA vehicle on the surface of another planet.

Opportunity traversed 263 feet of Martian landscape near Endeavour Crater to break the record of 22.21 miles set during the Apollo 17 mission. In 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrision Schmitt drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle to the NASA record.

In the coming weeks, nine-year-old Opportunity will surpass the international record for driving distance on another world held by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 robotic rover, which covered 23 miles of lunar surface in 1973. The Mars robot set off on a journey from "Cape York" where it has been working since 2011 toward a target known as “Solander Point” about 1.4 miles away.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project in addition to the Mars Science Laboratory Project and its rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars in August 2012.