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 between 2004 and 2018. On the lunar surface, the Soviet Union’s Lunokhud 2 rover holds the record with 39 km traversed in 1973.
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