The Opportunity rover, according to NASA, has recently eclipsed the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover for most non-Earth miles driven.

To most people, 25 miles of driving may not seem like a lot. In fact, many people travel that far every day in each direction as part of their commutes. Those people are not decade-old, remote-controlled interplanetary rovers driving on mars, however, which is why they have not been awarded any (off-)world records for their driving.

“Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world,” said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance. But what is really important is not how many miles the rover has racked up, but how much exploration and discovery we have accomplished over that distance.”

Most of Opportunity’s miles (20) occurred between its landing in 2004 and 2011, when it reached Endeavour Crater. It stopped there to gather and examine outcrops and found evidence of ancient basins containing water less acidic than its landing site.

If the rover can continue to operate the distance of a marathon – 26.2 miles – it will approach the next major investigation site mission scientists have dubbed “Marathon Valley.”

Though Opportunity’s accomplishments are one of a kind, that’s not meant to diminish the precedent set by Lunokhod 2, which landed on Earth’s moon in 1973. It’s said to have traveled a little over 24 miles in about five months, an unheard of feat at the time.

“The Lunokhod missions still stand as two signature accomplishments of what I think of as the first golden age of planetary exploration, the 1960s and ’70s,” said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and principal investigator for NASA’s twin Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit.

Squyres believes that with the accomplishments by Opportunity and the yet-to-be-realized ceiling of Curiosity, we may be entering a second golden age of space exploration.

In a show of both honor and a sense of humor, scientists chose to name a crater about 20 feet in diameter on the outer slope of Endeavour’s rim on Mars “Lunokhod 2” as Opportunity neared the mileage record.