Martian Milestone: Perseverance Breaks Distance Record on the Red Planet

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] This is Space Time, Series 29, Episode 127, full broadcast on the 23rd of 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 on Space Time.

[00:00:27] [SPEAKER_04] Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_02] NASA's Mars Perseverance rovers just set a new record for travelling the greatest distance ever achieved on another world. The KSI 6-wheeled mobile laboratory has now travelled a record setting 45.22km during its six years of exploration across the surface of the Red Planet. That surpasses the previous record at 45.16km set by NASA's Mars Opportunity rover, which spent nearly 15 years on the Martian surface exploring the Meridiani Planum.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_02] The milestone came as Perseverance travelled towards an area called Adubi through a region off the western rim of Jezero crater nicknamed Lac de Chame, with the rovers investigating what may be some of the oldest terrain ever 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 hoping to find traces of ancient hydrothermal

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_02] systems at the Adubi 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 and the rover. It allows the rover to cover up to 412 metres a day. NASA recently approved Perseverance's first mission extension, which will carry the rover's exploration

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_02] 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. 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

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_02] Opportunity arrived at the Red Planet in 2004. Spirit covered 7.7 kilometres inside Gusev crater for succumbing to the Martian winter in 2010. However, Opportunity kept rolling until 2015, setting the record Perseverance's twin rover, Curiosity, which began exploring Gale Crater in 2012, has now logged more than

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_02] 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 Cernan and Harrison Schmidt covered 35.7 kilometres in their lunar rover back in 1972. And the Soviet Union's LunarCod II robotic rover achieved 39 kilometres on the Moon the following year.

[00:03:29] [SPEAKER_02] 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 lake bed up a fossilised river system, where the rovers found potential biosignatures in a rock coche over falls, and now onto the very rim of Jezero crater, where an entirely different kind of ancient

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_02] habitat, a hydrothermal system, may well be awaiting it. So far, Perseverance has collected 29 rock and regular samples spanning the crater floor, a fan-shaped delta formed by a long-gone river. After Lac de Chame, 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

[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_02] which created Jezero crater in the first place. This report on the Perseverance mission from NASA TV.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_00] You know, Mars is the closest place that we can reach with robotic exploration that we think had

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_04] a really good chance of having ancient life. Jezero crater is a very interesting place. It's a crater

[00:04:41] [SPEAKER_00] that once held a lake. There are a lot of craters on the surface of Mars that could have once hosted ancient lakes, but not every crater that we think had a lake actually preserves evidence that that lake was

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_04] there. It had an inflow channel and it had an outflow channel. That means it was filled, the crater was

[00:04:58] [SPEAKER_00] filled with water. In Jezero, we have probably one of the most beautifully preserved delta deposits

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_04] on Mars in that crater. This is a wonderful place to live for 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

[00:05:18] [SPEAKER_00] later. There is no other place on Mars that has the unique combination of a lake setting, a beautifully preserved delta, and the diverse mineralogy that we have in Jezero crater. So it's truly a

[00:05:28] [SPEAKER_04] special landing site. The major goal of the Perseverance mission 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

[00:05:54] [SPEAKER_05] the search for biosignatures. Perseverance carries with her a grand experiment in spacefaring technology,

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_01] a helicopter, ingenuity. One of the major upgrades that Perseverance has from Curiosity is that it's able to self-drive for a distance of up to 200 meters per day. As the rover is driving, it's literally building the map of the road it's driving on on Mars. Scientists for years have told us that to

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_05] really unlock the secrets of Mars, we have to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. Drill samples,

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_04] 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. Perseverance is a very,

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_05] very profound first step in both our understanding of our place in the universe and a stepping stone

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_02] towards human exploration on Mars. In that report from NASA TV, we had from Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance's Project Scientist Ken Farley, the mission's Deputy Project Manager of Matt Wallace, its Chief Engineer Aidan Stelzner and Mobility Team member Farrah Alibay. This is Space Time. Still to come, NASA's Sunrise mission to explore the sun's corona to launch

[00:07:29] [SPEAKER_02] next year and an Adelaide University cancer stem cell experiment reaches space. All that and more still to come on Space Time. NASA has confirmed that its Sunrise mission will launch no earlier than the middle of next year. The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment mission comprises six small

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_02] 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. The heliophysics mission will hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center 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

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_02] kilometers 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 arrive at Earth

[00:08:50] [SPEAKER_02] 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 stealth-cell experiment reaches space and later in the science report, new research suggests that although cannabis may make you feel

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_02] sleepy, the evidence shows it actually leads to worse sleep quality. All that and more still to come, on Space Time. Human stem cells from Adelaide University's Center for Cancer Biology have successfully

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_02] traveled to the edge of space and back as part of a landmark mission for Australian cancer research. The cells were launched aboard a German aerospace center, Mafia 17 Sarning rocket from Sweden's Estrange Space Center, 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. The rocket reached an altitude of around 300 kilometers, giving the cells at least seven minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth for recovery and analysis. The researchers will now study the cells to investigate how they responded to

[00:10:10] [SPEAKER_02] microgravity and whether the changes could provide new insights into cancer progression and early detection. This is Space Time. And time now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making

[00:10:36] [SPEAKER_02] 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 use and recent use were linked to lower percentages of time of sleep, greater restlessness during sleep, and longer times spent awake after sleep onset. While

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_02] the objective measures showed worse sleep quality after having cannabis, when people were questioned about their sleep, they didn't 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 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

[00:11:31] [SPEAKER_02] the British Medical Journal involved 100 adults with normal to slightly elevated blood pressure who did three sessions of wall squats per week, finding the greatest drop in resting blood pressure after two months. Stopping after a month undid the benefits, but 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

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_02] Tasmanian devil populations. The findings reported in the Journal of the Royal Society Open Biology suggest the same strategy may also be useful for human cancer vaccine development. Looking at two types of contagious facial tumours impacting Tasci-devil populations, the authors identified several small protein fragments unique to the tumours, which they now believe could be used to design a vaccine. Archaeologists are working on what may be the world's oldest shipwreck. A report in the

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_02] 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 contained what could be the remains of what was once olive oil, wine or tree resins. There are now growing fears that the 1990s fad of repressed

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_02] memories could be making a comeback. The sceptics Tim Menden says the controversial therapy resulted in many innocent people being jailed for crimes they never committed. Repressed memory is sort of like

[00:13:03] [SPEAKER_03] offshoot 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 refreshed 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 of the 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

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_03] brought out thanks to a therapeutic idea. It applied to everything from sexual abuse and 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 early times, you're sort of horrified by the memory, hidden away and we will help you bring it up. It was entirely controversial, it was also labeled as false memory syndrome to the extent that there were

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_03] suggestions 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 it was really controversial, there was a US psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus who was one of the key people in criticizing repressed memory as a non-existent condition that's only being assisted by therapists of perhaps good intent through those, but you know

[00:14:25] [SPEAKER_03] that 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, especially fathers who were accused of abusing their children when it probably likely never happened and it was a situation rife with potential to cause real damage to people, to families, to individuals to create traumas that they never knew they had,

[00:14:52] [SPEAKER_03] all sorts of things like that. The events that were supposedly causing the trauma were often proved never to have happened. Memory is a very malleable thing. People say I remember this very clearly where it's known that memories aren't that clear and that you can manipulate a memory. Over time, things

[00:15:05] [SPEAKER_02] change, your mind changes, you hear other stories. I remember where I was when I heard the news that Nelson Mandela was shot. That's right, exactly that. He was never shot, he died of old age,

[00:15:14] [SPEAKER_03] resting comfortably. Yes, it became a famous situation where 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've known that in many cases. It happens quite normally. There's nothing particularly wrong about it but it just means that your memory is not a 100% reliable thing. It's not like a little movie in the back of your head. It is a moving feast. So supposedly bringing out a memory from the back room of your

[00:15:40] [SPEAKER_03] head, your brain and sort of highlighting it and sort of regarding that as an accurate retelling of what happened is totally unjustified. So whenever you hear someone saying repressed memory, take it with

[00:15:50] [SPEAKER_02] a grain of salt, please. That's the skeptics Tim Mendham and this is Space Time. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Bytes.com, SoundCloud, YouTube,

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[00:17:00] [SPEAKER_05] This has been another quality podcast production from bytes.com.