In December 1972, two men went for a drive on the moon. They were Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
The 20-km round trip took over seven and a half hours, and ventured no more than under 8 km from the lunar module, the spacecraft that allowed the astronauts to land on the moon. Yet it remains the furthest any human has traveled across a celestial body other than Earth.
The distances that robots have covered are only slightly longer. The winning rover is NASA’s Opportunity, which traveled a total of 45 km across the surface of Mars between 2004 and 2018. On the lunar surface, the Soviet Union’s Lunokhud 2 rover holds the record with 39 km traversed in 1973.