How Long Would It Take to Drive Around Mars?

Mars is about 21,300 km around the equator. Here is how long a real rover, a game rover and an astronaut on foot would need to drive all the way around.

Mars is a small planet compared with Earth, but it is still enormous for something that drives. Its equator is about 21,300 km long, a little over half of Earth's 40,075 km. So how long would a trip all the way around take?

A real Mars rover

Perseverance has a top speed of about 0.15 km/h (roughly 4 cm per second) on flat ground. In practice it drives much less than that, because every drive is planned on Earth, the rover stops to check for hazards and most days are spent on science, not driving.

Even if it could drive non-stop at full speed, day and night, a lap of Mars would take:

21,300 km ÷ 0.15 km/h ≈ 142,000 hours ≈ 16 years

With realistic driving of a few hundred metres on a good day, the real answer is thousands of years. The longest distance any rover has driven on another world is about 45 km, by Opportunity, over more than 14 years.

The Trawers rover

In Trawers the rover is faster than the real one: 2.5 m/s, or 9 km/h, about walking-to-jogging pace. Its battery lasts about two hours of driving and takes about six hours to recharge. That gives roughly 18 km per charge, or about 54 km per Earth day if you never miss a recharge.

21,300 km ÷ 54 km/day ≈ 395 days

So a full lap is possible, but only for very dedicated drivers who keep the rover going for more than a year in real time. That is the whole idea of the game: real distances that make Mars feel as big as it is. Players who complete a lap of the planet end up in the in-game Hall of Fame.

On foot

An astronaut walking at 5 km/h for eight hours a day would cover 40 km a day. That is about 530 days for a lap, ignoring the small detail of carrying oxygen, food and water for a year and a half.

Why the numbers matter

Pictures of Mars from orbit make it look compact. Driving it at real scale is the best way to feel how far apart places really are: from Jezero Crater, Perseverance's home, to Gale Crater, where Curiosity works, is more than 3,500 km across the surface.

Want to see how far you can get? Land on Mars in Trawers and start driving.