10 machines that have driven across the surface of another world

Only a handful of machines have ever rolled across ground that isn’t Earth’s, and each one had to survive a landing, a vacuum or near-vacuum atmosphere, and months of driving by remote control. Some covered less than the length of a football field before falling silent; one is still adding kilometers today. Here are ten machines that have driven across the surface of another world.

1. Lunokhod 1: The First Rover Ever

Lunokhod 1 became the first robotic rover to operate on another world when it rolled off its landing stage in Mare Imbrium on 17 November 1970, guided in real time by a five-person crew working from a control room outside Moscow. Over 322 Earth days the eight-wheeled machine covered 10,540 metres and sent back more than 20,000 television images, as detailed in the Lunokhod 1 mission record.

The crew steered blind through a several-second signal delay, a handicap that later shaped how NASA planned its own remote driving on Mars. Lunokhod 1 fell silent in October 1971 and sat unlocated for decades until a NASA orbiter finally photographed its resting spot.

2. Lunokhod 2: Doubling The Distance

Lunokhod 2 landed aboard Luna 21 on 15 January 1973 and drove off the ramp a day later into Le Monnier crater, picking up where its predecessor left off. Laser imaging from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later remeasured its tracks and pushed the traverse to roughly 39 kilometres, according to the LROC track analysis, up from the 37-kilometre figure long cited after the mission ended.

That distance held the off-Earth roving record for over four decades, until a NASA rover finally passed it in 2014. Overheating, likely from lunar dust kicked onto its solar panel and heat radiator, is thought to have ended the mission after about four months.

3. Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle: The Last Car On The Moon

The Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle carried astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt a cumulative 35.7 kilometres across the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972, spread over about four hours and twenty-six minutes of actual driving across three moonwalks, per the mission summary in NASA’s Apollo 17 record.

It was the third and final rover NASA flew to the Moon, each one built for a single mission and never brought home. Cernan parked it a short walk from the lunar module before the crew left, and it remains exactly where he left it.

4. Sojourner: Twelve Times Its Warranty

Sojourner rolled down a ramp off the Mars Pathfinder lander on 5 July 1997, becoming the first wheeled vehicle to operate on another planet. It was designed to last a week and instead kept working for 83 sols, travelling a modest 104 metres, according to the Sojourner mission history.

At just 65 centimetres long, it moved at a crawl and never strayed far from the lander that relayed its commands and data back to Earth. Its short, cautious drives nonetheless proved a solar-powered rover could survive Martian dust, cold and terrain well enough to justify building much bigger ones.

5. Spirit: Stuck In Soft Sand

Spirit landed in Gusev Crater in January 2004 on a mission built to last 90 days, then kept roving for more than six years before NASA ended contact attempts in May 2011. Across that span it covered 4.8 miles, according to NASA’s mission overview of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers.

A wheel had failed years earlier, and Spirit was dragging it sideways through the soil when the rover broke through a crust and sank into fine sand in 2009. Unable to free itself or tilt its panels enough to survive the Martian winter, it froze in place and never called home again.

6. Opportunity: Outlasting Every Estimate

Opportunity landed three weeks after its twin Spirit and kept driving for almost fifteen years, far beyond its planned 90-day mission. JPL declared the mission over on 13 February 2019 after receiving no signal since 10 June 2018, by which point the rover had logged 28.06 miles, the longest drive of any off-Earth rover.

A planet-wide dust storm blotted out the sun over its location in mid-2018, starving its solar panels of the power needed to charge its batteries or run a survival heater. Engineers sent more than a thousand recovery commands over eight months before giving up.

7. Curiosity: Still Climbing Mount Sharp

Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater in August 2012 using a rocket-powered sky crane, a landing method never tried before or repeated since on that scale. NASA’s Where Is Curiosity tracking, cited in the rover’s mission page, put its total odometry at 37.43 kilometres as of 14 July 2026.

Unlike the solar-powered rovers before it, Curiosity runs on a plutonium power source that doesn’t fade with dust storms or winter darkness. It has spent years climbing the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, drilling rock samples that record how Mars’s climate changed over billions of years.

8. Perseverance: Caching Samples For Earth

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021 and had driven more than 30 kilometres by October 2024, according to NASA’s Mars 2020 mission page. Along the way it drilled and sealed 24 rock and regolith samples into titanium tubes.

Those tubes are meant to be collected by a future retrieval mission and flown back to Earth, something no piece of Mars has ever done before. Perseverance also towed a small helicopter, Ingenuity, which flew dozens of test flights before its rotor blades were damaged in a hard landing.

9. Yutu-2: Alone On The Far Side

Yutu-2 rode the Chang’e 4 lander down to the Moon’s far side in January 2019, a region no spacecraft had ever touched before because it can’t communicate directly with Earth. Relaying through a dedicated satellite, it later passed Lunokhod 1’s lunar-surface longevity record, with China’s space agency reporting over 345 metres of travel at that point, per coverage of the milestone.

It drives only during the two-week lunar day and powers down through freezing two-week nights, a cycle it has now repeated for years. Mission controllers plot its route carefully to dodge rough terrain and small craters that could trap its wheels.

10. Zhurong: Gone Quiet In Utopia Planitia

Zhurong landed in Utopia Planitia on 14 May 2021 and rolled off its platform a week later, making China the second country to drive a working rover on Mars. It had covered 1,921 metres by 5 May 2022, per the mission timeline on its Wikipedia mission page, before entering a planned hibernation for the Martian winter on 18 May 2022.

Dust that settled on its solar panels during a regional storm is thought to have blocked it from waking back up as scheduled. Controllers have not regained contact since, and Zhurong is now presumed to be a permanent fixture of the plain it explored.

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