2026 June 27 - Mars Marathon by Perseverance

[00:00:02]Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast.

[00:00:07]Today's picture is titled Mars Marathon by Perseverance.

[00:00:13]So, what do we see here?

[00:00:15]Well, here we see an image taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So, spacecraft orbiting Mars and continually imaging and studying the surface of the red planet.

[00:00:27]Now, the green dot there marked inside that circle off to the left of center is actually the Perseverance rover. So, that is a rover that has been exploring Mars for over 5 years now and wandering around its surface. And you might wonder how far the rover might travel in that time and it's not very long. In fact, this was taken on June the 13th, one day before Perseverance completed its marathon on Mars, meaning that it finally traveled a total distance of 26.218 miles or 42.195 kilometers.

[00:01:11]So, essentially the length of a marathon and it's taken it 5 years and 4 months to be able to do that.

[00:01:21]Why? The rover has to move at very slow speeds looking for obstacles, it takes its time looking around and it may stop and study a certain area. In fact, if you look carefully, you can actually see the track that the rover took to get to this location. So, we can see the track there off to the right-hand side, then traveling toward the bottom, then up and around and above where the circle is.

[00:01:48]Finally finishing up at the current location of the rover.

[00:01:53]Now, Perseverance is not the first craft to complete a marathon on Mars. In fact, another one of the rovers actually did this previously, and that would be the Opportunity rover, which completed its marathon in 2015.

[00:02:12]It took much longer to do that. It actually took over 11 years to complete its marathon-length journey over the surface of Mars.

[00:02:24]Now, currently we do have two rovers studying Mars, and that would be Perseverance and Curiosity, which continue to study the red planet and look for signs of a either ancient Martian life or current life, if we can detect that.

[00:02:43]>> [snorts] >> Possible life on Mars is still not something we can rule out. We can certainly rule out that there was is no advanced and was never any advanced civilization on Mars, but very simple life could have formed billions of years ago when Mars was a much wetter world than it is today. And life, once it forms, is very resilient and tends to find a way to be able to survive. So, if life did once form on Mars, it's possible that there still could be remnants or even living microorganisms from Mars to this day.

[00:03:22]So, that was our picture of the day, titled Mars Marathon by Perseverance.

[00:03:29]We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture, preview to be super galactic. So, we'll see what that is about tomorrow.

[00:03:37]And until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.