Martian Milestone: Perseverance Breaks Distance Record on the Red Planet

0:00Stuart Gary This is space Time Series 29

0:02 episode 127 full broadcast on 23 October 2026. Coming up on space time, NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover sets a new record. NASA's Sunrise mission to explore the sun's corona to launch next year and an Adelaide University cancer stem cell experiment reaches space. All that and more coming up um, on Space Time.

0:27 Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover just set a new record for uh, travelling the greatest distance ever achieved on another world. The KSI 6 World Mobile Laboratory has now travelled a record setting 45.22 kilometres during its six years of exploration across the surface of the Red Planet. That surpasses the previous record at 45.16 kilometres set by NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover which spent nearly 15 years on the Martian surface exploring the Meridiani Planum. The milestone came as Perseverance travelled towards an area called Dubi through a region off the western rim of Jezero Crater, uh, nicknamed Lakdashami, where the rover is investigating what may be some of the oldest terrain ever

1:27 explored in our solar system. In fact, the rocks and terrain here are so ancient that their earthly equivalents have long since been erased by erosion and plate tectonics. Mission managers are uh, hoping to find traces of ancient hydrothermal systems at the Adobe site. The new record is thanks to Perseverance's self driving capabilities using an autonomous navigation system known as AutoNav which images the terrain ahead of it as the rover moves, building up a three dimensional map of hazards and plotting its course between waypoints selected by mission managers back on Earth. It allows the rover to cover up to 412 metres a day.

2:05 NASA recently approved Perseverance's first mission extension which will carry the rover's exploration of the crater rim through to roughly the end of 2028. Perseverance's record caps nearly three decades of NASA rover operations on Mars, each mission having driven further and more capably than the previous one.

2:24 The microwave oven sized Sojourner rover covered around 100 metres on the ancient Aries Valley's floodplain during its 83 day mission on Mars back in 1997. The golf cart sized twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived at the red Planet in 2004. Spirit covered 7.7 kilometres inside Gusev Crater before succumbing to the Martian winter in 2010.

2:47 However, opportunity kept rolling until 2015 setting the record. Perseverance is now surpassed until becoming bogged in a sand dune. Meanwhile, Perseverance's twin rover Curiosity, which began exploring gale crater in 2012, has now logged more than 38.07 kilometres. And it's also continuing to go strong. Of course, extraterrestrial off roading records aren't limited to just Mars. Lunar driving records have also been broken. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cern and Harrison Schmidt covered 35.7 kilometres in their lunar rover back in 1972.

3:22 And the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 robotic rover achieved 39 kilometres on the moon the following year. Of course, setting distant records on alien worlds isn't the main game. Reliability and durability on long drives mean covering more geologically diverse terrain, studying more outcrops and learning more about the Red Planet's history and its rocks. That journey has now taken Perseverance from an ancient lakebed, up a fossilised river system where the rovers found potential biosignatures in a rock called Cha Falls, and now onto the very rim of Jezero Crater, where an entirely different kind of ancient habitat, a hydrothermal system, may well be awaiting it. So far, uh, Perseverance has collected 29 rock and regolith samples

4:07 spanning the crater floor. A fan shaped delta formed by a long gone river after Lac du Chamet. The rover will continue along the crater rim and head south during the extended mission towards Rainbow Falls. A 100 metre wide block of ancient crust uplifted by the very impact which created Jethro Crater in the first place. This report on the Perseverance mission from NASA tv.

4:30Ken Farley You know, Mars is the closest place that we

4:33 can reach with robotic exploration that we think had a really good chance of having ancient life.

4:38Katie Stack Morgan Jezero Crater is a very interesting place.

4:41 It's a crater that once held a lake.

4:43Ken Farley There are a lot of craters on, um, the

4:45 surface of Mars that could have once hosted ancient lakes. But not every, um, crater that we think had a lake actually preserves evidence that that lake was there.

4:54Katie Stack Morgan It had an inflow channel and it had an

4:56 outflow channel. That means it was filled, the crater was filled with water.

5:00Ken Farley In Jezero, we have probably one of the most

5:02 beautifully preserved delta deposits on Mars in that crater.

5:07Katie Stack Morgan This is a wonderful place to live for

5:09 microorganisms and it is also a wonderful place for those microorganisms to be preserved so that we can find them now, so many billions of years later.

5:18Ken Farley There is no other place on Mars that has the

5:20 unique combination of a lake setting, a beautifully preserved delta and, and the diverse mineralogy that we have in Jezero Crater. So it's Truly a special landing site.

5:30Katie Stack Morgan The major goal of the Perseverance mission

5:33 is to investigate astrobiology on Mars and in particular to address the question of whether life ever existed on Mars. The Perseverance rover starts with a design that's very similar to Curiosity, but we've added to it a whole new set of science instruments. And these science instruments were purposefully selected to help us in the search for biosignatures.

5:56 Perseverance carries with her a grand experiment in space faring technology, a helicopter ingenuity.

6:04Ken Farley One of the major upgrades that Perseverance

6:07 has from Curiosity is that it's able to self drive for a distance of uh, up to 200 metres per day. As the rover is driving, it's literally building the map of the road it's driving on on Mars.

6:21Katie Stack Morgan Scientists for years have told us that to

6:23 really unlock the secrets of Mars, we have to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. Drill samples, put them in small tubes, we're going to seal it in its own individual tube. We set them on the surface to provide a target for the second two missions which hopefully will get in development in the next several years and could potentially get the samples back to Earth by 2031.

6:48 Perseverance is a very, very profound first step in both our understanding of our place in the universe and a stepping stone towards human exploration on Mars.

7:06Stuart Gary In that report from NASA tv we heard from

7:08 Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack, Morgan, Perseverance's project scientist Ken Farley, the mission's deputy project manager Matt Wallace, its chief engineer Aidan Stelzner and mobility team member Fera Alabay. This is space time still to come. NASA's sunrise mission to explore the sun's corona to launch next year and an Adelaide University cancer stem cell experiment reaches space. All that and more still to come on um, space time.

7:43 NASA has confirmed that its sunrise launch no earlier than the middle of next year. The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment mission comprises six small toaster oven sized satellites flying in configuration, allowing them to operate as a single giant aperture synthesis radio telescope dish studying the sun's corona.

8:03 The Heliophysics mission will hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Sharing payload space with a mission for the United States Space Force's Space Systems Command. The mission's six small cubesats will fly in a super synchronous geosynchronous orbit some 35,000 kilometres in altitude above the Earth's ionosphere, allowing it to detect low frequency radio waves that ground based telescopes simply can't see Sunrise will study giant solar particle storms, map the sun's magnetic field lines into interplanetary space and track solar radio bursts to improve space weather forecasting. These bursts are generated by accelerated particles leaving the sun. The solar radio waves

8:49 arrive at Earth before the solar energetic particles. In extreme cases, solar particle events can damage satellites and affect astronauts. So using sunrise to track the radio waves could improve prediction and mitigation efforts. This is space time still to come. An Adelaide cancer stillsim experiment reaches space. And later in the Science report, new research suggests that although cannabis may make you feel sleepy, the evidence shows it actually leads to worse sleep quality. All that and more still to come on, um, spacetime.

9:39 Human stem cells from Adelaide University Centre for Cancer Biology have successfully travelled to the edge of space and back as part of a landmark mission for Australian cancer research. The SILS were launched aboard a German Aerospace Centre Mafia 17 Sarling rocket from Sweden's estranged space centre, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. The rocket reached an altitude of around 300 kilometres, giving the cells at least seven minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth, uh, for recovery and analysis. The researchers will now study the cells to investigate how they responded to microgravity and whether the changes could provide new insights into cancer progression and early detection. This is space,

10:17 time. And time. Now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in Science this week with a Science report. While cannabis might make you feel sleepy, new research suggests that recreational cannabis may actually lead to worse sleep quality. A report in the Journal of the American Medical association used risk monitors to objectively measure sleep quality. And they found that both cumulative cannabis used in recent use were linked to lower percentages of time asleep, greater restlessness during sleep and longer time spent awake after sleep onset. While the objective measures showed worse sleep quality after having cannabis, when people were questioned about their sleep, they didn't

11:09 report feeling any poorer. Which the authors say shows why it's important to objectively measure sleep quality while trying to assess the impact of cannabis on sleep. A uh, new study shows that holding poses like squats and planks can actually lower your blood pressure. And just one such exercise session every week may be enough to keep it down. The findings reported in the British Medical Journal involved 100 adults with normal to slightly elevated blood pressure who did three sessions of wall squats per week.

11:38 Finding the greatest drop in resting blood pressure after two months. Stopping after a month undid the benefits. But, uh, dropping down to just one or two sessions per week in the second month still kept blood pressure lower than what it was at the start. Scientists have identified a new strategy that could be used to design a vaccine for cancers decimating Tasmanian devil populations. The findings, reported in the Journal of the Royal Society of Open Biology, suggest the same strategy may also be useful for human cancer vaccine development. Looking at two types of contagious facial tumours impacting Tassie devil populations, the authors identified several small protein fragments unique to the tumours, which they

12:17 now believe could be used to design a vaccine. Archaeologists are, uh, working on what may be the world's oldest shipwreck. A report in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology claims amphorae, pottery and other artefacts discovered off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey date back to the early Bronze age, between 4,700 and 4,400 years ago. The authors say some of the pots being recovered still contain what could be the remains of what was once olive oil, wine or tree resins.

12:49 There are now growing fears that the 1990s fad of repressed memories could be making a comeback. The sceptics Timms Mendham says the controversial therapy resulted in many innocent people being jailed for crimes they never committed.

13:02Tim Mendham Repressed memory is sort of like an offshoot

13:04 of Freudian psychology. Hidden traumas that you sort of have put into the back of your mind and certain events bring it out, especially with the help of therapists who can sort of talk to you and bring out these repressed memories. The issue was at the time that it was seriously investigated. Freudian psychology is not without controversy. The suggestion was that the therapists were probably inputting as much of this memory as the people had themselves part problem with traumatic memories is people, they try to forget them, they reappear all the time and they're not like they're hidden away in the back corner of the mind to be brought out thanks to a therapeutic idea. It's been applied to everything from sexual abuse and

13:38 that was the big controversial area. People claiming that their parents had sexually abused them or they'd been through witchcraft ceremonies or all sorts of things, all the way to UFO abductions. You were abducted at an early time, you sort of horrified by the memory, hidden it away and we will help you bring it up. It was highly controversial.

13:54 It was also labelled as false memory syndrome. To the extent that they were suggesting that it was the psychologists themselves helping out a client, in many cases in a legal situation, in a legal context, to bring back these memories that might never have existed. The event they're remembering might never have occurred. So, uh, it was really controversial. There was a US psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus who was one of the key people in criticising repressed memory as a, uh, non existent condition that's only being assisted by therapists of perhaps good intent, who knows?

14:24 But uh, it was a false memory. She got death threats and all sorts of things for that. Since then it's probably still being used, but nowhere near as much as it was in those days became a big issue. Families were broken up, people were sent to jail to see fathers who were accused of abusing their children when it probably likely never happened. And it was a uh, situation rife with potential to cause real damage to people, to families, to individuals, to create traumas that they never knew they had. All sorts of things like that. The events that were supposedly causing the trauma were often proved never to have happened. Memories are very malleable thing. People say, I remember this very clearly where it's known that

15:01 memories aren't that clear and that you can manipulate a memory over time. Things change, your mind changes, you hear other stories.

15:07Stuart Gary I remember where I was when I heard the news

15:09 that Nelson Mandela was shot.

15:11Tim Mendham That's right, exactly.

15:12Stuart Gary That he was never shot. He died of old age,

15:14 resting comfortably.

15:15Tim Mendham Yes. And it became a famous situation where

15:18 uh, people were saying yes, I remember when he was shot. And so false memories, people remember things. People often tag themselves onto someone else's memory. Oh yeah, I was there then and say, no you weren't. Whatever. I m know that in many cases happens quite normally. There's nothing particularly wrong about it, but it just means that your memory is not 100% reliable thing. It's not like a little moving in the back of your head. It is a moving feast. So supposedly bringing out a memory from the back room of your head, your brain and sort of highlighting it and sort of regarding that as an accurate retelling of what happened is totally unjustified.

15:47 So whenever you hear someone saying repressed memory, take it with a grain of salt, please.

15:51Stuart Gary That's the sceptics, Timms Mendham. And this

15:54 is Space Time. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes.com, soundcloud, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider. And from spacetimewithstuartgarry.com spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartradio and TuneIn radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Space store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies or by becoming a Space Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonus audio content which doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to

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