Moon & Mars Mondays

From The Decisional Pass · your weekly read on the Moon and Mars

Sorry for delaying this one — but it's too good to skip.

Two worlds, one theme this week: doing more, faster, and buying the infrastructure to keep doing it.

🔴 Perseverance runs a marathon on Mars

Perseverance has now driven a full marathon on Mars — 42.195 km — and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught it from above, the rover a lone green speck trailing its own tracks across the dust. The number that stops me is the pace: Perseverance covered that distance in five years and four months, where its predecessor Opportunity took over eleven years to reach the same mark. A big part of that is autonomy — the rover increasingly plans its own paths across the terrain, driving while its human team sleeps. It's now closing in on Opportunity's all-time off-world distance record, and should take it later this year.

References: NASA/JPL — HiRISE captures the milestone · ScienceDaily

🌙 NASA buys four more Moon landings

NASA committed nearly $600 million for four commercial lunar landings targeted for late 2028, under its Moon Base program: Astrobotic takes two, with one each for Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines. Every lander carries the same trio of instruments — a laser retroreflector for precision navigation, a radiation spectrometer, and a four-camera rig that films how the descent engine's plume blasts the surface. That last one is quietly the most important: you cannot safely build a base until you understand the dust a landing kicks up. In the same breath, NASA pruned the manifest — a Draper-led far-side delivery was cancelled after development delays, with its payloads likely to migrate onto other landers.

References: ScienceDaily · NASASpaceflight

👀 On the horizon

• China's turn at the south pole. CNSA still aims to fly Chang'e 7 to the lunar south pole later this year to hunt for water ice — the same resource everyone's landers are ultimately chasing.
• Curiosity keeps working a geologic boundary in Gale Crater, reading the transition between rock layers one contact measurement at a time.

Follow every lander and rover on the Lunar Race tracker and across the Orbital Roster dashboard.

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