On Tuesday, NASA's Opportunity Rover clocked in an 11 year and two month marathon. It's now been operating nearly 45 times longer than initially planned, and it's "run" a significant 26.219 miles during that residency on the red planet.

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

This is undoubtedly a cool milestone for the intrepid rover, but it blew through the real record last year when it became the universal long-distance champ for all man-made, off-Earth vehicles.

"This mission isn't about setting distance records, of course; it's about making scientific discoveries on Mars and inspiring future explorers to achieve even more," Steve Squyres, Opportunity principal investigator at Cornell University, said in a statement. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool."

Opportunity has been a massive return on investment for NASA, and it's pretty mind-boggling that the rover is still doing science despite its old age. She's like 1,000 in rover years.

To celebrate Opportunity's big win, the rover team at JPL will run a marathon-length relay next week at their lab. Hopefully their times are a little bit better.

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