Mars rover completes first ‘marathon’ on another world

— How long LOSANGELES does it take to complete a marathon on Mars? About 11 years and two months — if you’ve got six wheels and a solar-powered battery.

NASA’s spunky rover Opportunity crossed the Olympic marathon mark last week, putting 26.219 miles on its odometer during its 3,968th Martian day.

While that time wouldn’t come close to breaking landspeed records on Earth, it certainly qualifies anywhere else.

“This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world,” John Callas, Opportunity’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

In July, NASA announced that Opportunity had broken the otherworldly driving distance record held by Lunokhod 2, a rover sent to the moon by the Soviet Union in 1973.

Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, touched down on opposite sides of the Red Planet back in January 2004. The two members of the Mars Exploration Rover mission were tasked with studying the Martian terrain to understand how water once shaped the now-barren planet.

It took less than six weeks for Opportunity to find convincing evidence that Mars indeed had a watery past. The proof came in the form of rocks full of sulfate salts, NASA scientists said.

Opportunity’s initial mission was expected to last only about 90 days and take the rover a mere 0.6 miles from its landing site.