NASA’s Perseverance Sets Off-World Record for Total Distance Driven

 

This animated orbital-map view shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has taken from time of its 2021 landing to Oct. 11, 2026 — the day it broke the off-world driving record previously held by the agency’s Opportunity rover. As of that date, Perseverance has driven over 28 miles (45 kilometers). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has driven farther than any vehicle ever has on the surface of another world. On Oct. 11, the rover’s odometer reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), eclipsing the record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) set by NASA’s Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018. Perseverance reached the mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity almost 15.

The milestone came as Perseverance traveled toward an area called “Idubi” through the region off the western rim of Jezero Crater nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” where the rover is investigating what may be some of the oldest terrain ever explored in the solar system. The rocks and terrain of Lac de Charmes are so ancient that their Earthly equivalents have long since been erased by erosion and plate tectonics (Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates), and Idubi is where the science team hopes to find traces of ancient hydrothermal systems.

Much of the credit belongs to Perseverance’s self-driving capability. Using an autonomous navigation system known as AutoNav, the rover images the terrain while rolling, builds a 3D map of hazards, and plots its course between waypoints selected by rover planners on Earth — a capability the team calls “thinking while driving.” Perseverance can do all that at or near its top speed, covering as much as 1,351 feet (412 meters) in a single sol. The six-wheeled scientist has driven more than 90% of its total distance using AutoNav to evaluate the terrain, compared with about 5% for the first Martian AutoNav system on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. Where NASA’s first Mars rover, Sojourner, assessed the path ahead using 20 measurement points, Perseverance processes 600,000 with every look.

One of Perseverance’s navigation cameras captured this shot on Oct. 11, 2026, the Martian day, or sol, that a 299.6-foot (91.31-meter) drive pushed the rover’s total mileage past Opportunity’s 28.06-mile (45.16-kilometer) record on Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

“It is an honor to be working on Perseverance at a moment when the technology has evolved to the point that drives like these are routine,” said Steven Lee, the project manager of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The original mission called for no more than 12.4 miles of driving. We’ve blown well past that, and with all mobility systems fully operational and favorable extended-ground-life test results, we expect Perseverance to keep adding to this record for many years to come.”

NASA recently approved the mission’s first extension, which began in October and will carry Perseverance’s exploration of the crater rim through roughly the end of 2028.

On six wheels, many shoulders

Perseverance’s record caps nearly three decades of NASA rover operations on Mars, each mission driving farther and more capably than the last.

The microwave-oven-size Sojourner rover covered about 330 feet (100 meters) during its 83-sol mission in 1997. The golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity arrived in 2004 with 90-sol prime missions. Spirit logged 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers) before succumbing to the Martian winter in 2010. Opportunity kept rolling for 5,111 sols, completing the first extraterrestrial marathon in 2015 and setting the record Perseverance has now surpassed. The agency’s Curiosity rover, which landed in Gale Crater in 2012 and remains hard at work, has logged more than 23.65 miles (38.07 kilometers).

“The rover that broke this record did so by making its own decisions about the path. Given the autonomy to just go, Perseverance is a better driver than the one that landed, and we’re not done,” Mark Maimone, deputy team chief for robotic operations on Perseverance. “Our newest software teaches Perseverance to steer less and roll more, and to check its own position against orbital maps mid-drive. The next frontier is sunlight itself. Glare in the navigation cameras is why we park by mid-afternoon if we’re driving toward the Sun, and if we can teach the rover to see past those artifacts, every rover that follows gets a longer working day.”

This infographic illustrates the distances driven by various rovers on the surface of Earth’s Moon and Mars. Of the vehicles shown, the NASA Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity are still operational and moving across the surface; the figures shown for those two are distances driven as of Oct. 11, 2026.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The extraterrestrial off-road driving record isn’t limited to Mars: Lunar driving records were broken earlier in the journey. Perseverance rolled past both the 22.2 miles (35.7 kilometers) covered by Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972 and the 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) driven by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover in 1973.

Setting distance records is just a bonus. Stamina and longer drives are putting more geologic diversity within reach faster — more outcrops examined and more of the Red Planet’s history read from its rocks. That reach carried Perseverance from an ancient lakebed up a fossilized river system, where the rover found a potential biosignature at a rock called “Cheyava Falls,” and on to the crater rim, where an entirely different kind of ancient habitat — hydrothermal — may await.

Perseverance has collected 29 rock and regolith samples spanning the crater floor, a delta fan formed by a long-gone river, and now the crater rim. In the latter region, it has been exploring impact-generated rocks some 4 billion years old, from a chapter of planetary history almost entirely erased on Earth.

After Lac de Charmes, the rover will continue along the crater rim and head south during the extended mission towards Rainbow Falls, a 328-foot-wide (100-meter-wide) block of ancient crust uplifted by the impact that created Jezero. 

Source: NASA’s Perseverance Sets Off-World Record for Total Distance Driven - NASA Science

An Injection That Tells Fat Cells to Self-Destruct: What the Early Data Show (and What They Don’t)

Most obesity drugs work by turning down appetite. A new experimental injection takes a different route: it tells fat cells to die. The drug, called CBL-514, was presented at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Milan, and early results suggest it can shrink not only the fat you can pinch under the skin, but also the deep abdominal fat that wraps around your organs.

How does it work?

CBL-514 is a small-molecule injection designed to trigger apoptosis, the natural, orderly process by which a cell dismantles itself, in adipocytes (fat cells). According to its developer, Caliway Biopharmaceuticals in Taiwan, it leaves other cell types untouched. The idea is that fewer fat cells could mean less capacity to store fat in the first place.

Why visceral fat matters

Subcutaneous fat sits just under the skin. Visceral fat lies deep in the abdomen, around organs such as the liver and intestines. It is metabolically very active and is a major driver of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. That is why a treatment that reaches visceral fat is far more interesting medically than one that only changes how the waistline looks. Liposuction and abdominoplasty, for comparison, address only the subcutaneous layer.

What the human data show

The new analysis used MRI scans from a subgroup of two phase 2 trials (CBL-0204 and CBL-0205). Participants had a BMI between 22 and 30 and received abdominal injections of up to 600 mg of CBL-514 or placebo every three weeks, for up to 12 weeks. Forty people had follow-up data: 23 on the drug and 17 on placebo.

·         Four weeks after the last injection, visceral fat volume was on average 12.01% lower than baseline in the CBL-514 group, versus a 5.68% increase with placebo (a gap of 17.69 percentage points).

·         At the later follow-up (8 to 12 weeks after the last injection), the drug group was still 10.45% below baseline, while the placebo group had risen 11.76% (a gap of 22.21 percentage points).

·         In earlier phase 2 data on subcutaneous fat, 69.6% of treated participants lost at least 150 mL of fat volume at 8 weeks, compared with none on placebo.

·         Side effects were mostly mild to moderate, temporary injection-site reactions (pain, swelling, redness). No serious adverse events were reported.

The weight-regain idea: so far, only in rats

Many people regain weight after stopping GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or Zepbound. In rats, adding CBL-514 to tirzepatide led to greater weight loss than tirzepatide alone, and the animals regained less weight after tirzepatide was stopped. The researchers hypothesize that with fewer fat cells, fat accumulates back more slowly. This has not been tested in humans, and the researchers themselves say it still needs to be proven.

Reasons for caution

·         No peer-reviewed paper yet. The results come from a late-breaking conference abstract. An independent expert quoted by the Science Media Centre noted that no full paper is available for this analysis.

·         Small sample, short follow-up. Forty people, followed for 8 to 12 weeks. A BMI range of 22 to 30 also spans normal weight up to the threshold of obesity, so this was not a group defined by obesity.

·         The placebo group gained visceral fat. This widens the gap between groups. The drug group’s own change was roughly a 10% reduction.

·         Links to the developer. According to the conflict-of-interest statement, Yu-Fang Ling, who is named in the press release as a co-analyst, is employed by and holds stock in Caliway, which makes the drug. Dr. W. Timothy Garvey, who presented the data, lists Caliway among the many companies whose advisory boards he has served on.

·         Open safety questions. Professor Justin Rochford of the University of Aberdeen pointed out that in rare diseases where healthy fat tissue is lost (lipodystrophies), fat shifts to organs such as the liver and can cause diabetes and heart disease. He said it will be important to show what CBL-514 does to liver fat, blood fats, and blood sugar control. Dr. Marie Spreckley of the University of Cambridge added that these results do not yet show that the treatment helps people lose weight or improves their health.

What comes next

Recruitment is under way for the first of two randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trials testing CBL-514 for non-surgical abdominal fat reduction, with first results expected at the end of 2027. Those trials, and longer follow-up that looks at liver fat and metabolic markers, will show whether the early signal holds up. Until then, CBL-514 is an interesting idea with promising but preliminary data.

Sources

·         Press release: European Association for the Study of Diabetes, “New weight-loss injection targets fat cells,” EurekAlert!, 1 October 2026: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1146063

·         Original research: Ling Y, Liang M, Garvey T, et al. CBL-514, a First-in-Class Adipocyte Apoptosis-Inducing Injection, Reduces MRI-Measured L2-L3 Visceral Adipose Tissue: Translational Evidence from Preclinical Models to a Phase 2 Clinical Trial. Late-breaking abstract LBA57, EASD Annual Meeting 2026, Milan. This is a conference abstract; no full peer-reviewed paper has been published.

·         Expert reaction: Science Media Centre, 1 October 2026: Expert reaction to conference abstract about CBL-514 

Source: An Injection That Tells Fat Cells to Self-Destruct: What the Early Data Show (and What They Don’t)