Blog · Oct 31, 2026

How many rovers are on Mars?

Two rovers are working on Mars today: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance. Six rovers have driven on Mars in all, five from NASA and one from China, and the other four are still there, silent. If you count the two small Soviet rovers that reached the planet in 1971 but never drove, eight rovers have reached Mars.

Which rovers are on Mars right now?

Here are the six that have driven there, oldest first. All six are still on the surface, since none was built to leave.

Those distances keep changing for the two working rovers, so treat them as dated snapshots. Our page on Mars rovers has more on each mission.

Which rover has driven the farthest?

Perseverance. NASA says its odometer reached 45.22 kilometers (28.10 miles) on Oct 11, 2026, which passed the 45.16 kilometers Opportunity had held as the record. Opportunity took more than 14 years to cover its distance. Perseverance needed less than six.

What happened to the rovers that stopped?

They ended in different ways, and only some of the endings are fully understood.

• Sojourner: Its mission ended with the final data transmission on Sep 27, 1997.
• Spirit: NASA says only that it concluded its mission in 2010.
• Opportunity: The solar-powered rover last communicated on Jun 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm covered its location. NASA's last attempt to revive it failed in February 2019.
• Zhurong: This is the one case without a clear ending. See below.

Is China's Zhurong rover dead?

Probably, but we found no formal declaration that its mission is over. Zhurong went dormant in May 2022. The HiRISE camera on a NASA orbiter then showed that it had not changed position between Sep 8, 2022 and Feb 7, 2023. In April 2023, The Register reported that the rover's chief designer, Zhang Rongqiao, told Chinese state media that built-up dust had likely hurt its ability to generate power.

The report's wording is careful: the rover was confirmed inoperable, but Zhang did not say whether this was the final end. Our sources on Zhurong are also weaker than those on the NASA rovers. We read that interview through The Register, not in the original, and we found little news on it since 2023.

Why do some lists say more than six?

Because they count differently, and three cases cause most of the disagreement.

• The Soviet PrOP-M rovers. The Mars 2 and Mars 3 landers each carried one, a small box on skis, tied to its lander by a 15-meter cable. Mars 2 crashed. Mars 3 landed on Dec 2, 1971 but failed about 110 seconds later, so its rover was lost too. Neither drove, so we leave them out of the six. We could not load NASA's own catalog records for these missions, so this rests on Wikipedia and should carry less weight than the rest of this post.
• The Ingenuity helicopter. It rode to Mars with Perseverance and made 72 flights before NASA ended its mission on Jan 25, 2024. It flew rather than drove, so it is not a rover.
• "NASA rovers" versus "all rovers." A list of NASA's rovers stops at five, because Zhurong is Chinese.

Landing dates can also differ by a day between sources. NASA's own pages give both Aug 6 and Aug 5, 2012 for Curiosity.

Is another rover on the way?

The next one planned is Europe's. The European Space Agency says its mission carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover will target launch in 2028. A target is not a date, and the rover would not be on Mars until some time after it leaves Earth.

More from the blog

Oct 31, 2026How can you tell if an AI-written article is accurate?Check it claim by claim. Open the cited source, find the passage that backs the claim, and check its date. Here is why that works and what the research found.Oct 31, 2026Welcome to the Heartipedia blogWhy an encyclopedia has a blog, and what you can expect to read here every day.