NASA is once again making history, this time with its Opportunity rover, which, on Thursday, logged a total 22.22 statute miles since landing on Mars in Jan. 2004.
In effect, the Opportunity beat the (out-of-this) world record set in Dec. 1972, when Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle 22.21 statute miles on the moon.
"The record we established with a roving vehicle was made to be broken," Cernan said this week, according to NASA. "I'm excited and proud to be able to pass the torch to Opportunity."
The rover's odometer will continue to tick upward on its multi-week trek from the "Cape York" segment of the rim of Endeavour crater, where it has been working for two years, to an area about 1.4 miles away called "Solander Point," NASA said
Opportunity reached the massive Endeavour crater in Aug. 2011 with the intent of studying rocks that had never been seen before. As the rover continued its research on Mars, it snagged more than 800 images of the planet, which NASA later released as a panoramic view.
The Opportunity recently took a rest from April 9-26, necessitated by what is known as a solar conjunction, so scientists did some extra planning ahead of Opportunity's three-week journey.
While the U.S. continues to make great strides, the international record for out-of-this-world driving distance is still held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles on the moon in 1973.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, meanwhile, has moved 0.43 miles since landing on the Red Planet in August.
Check out the progression of various wheeled vehicles in NASA's full infographic below.