How many rovers are on Mars depends on what you count: eight have reached the surface, six have driven on it, and two are still working as of September 2026 — NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance. The other four that drove, Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and China's Zhurong, sit silent where they stopped. The first two to arrive, Soviet PrOP-M units from 1971, never moved. NASA sent five of the eight. Mars Rally Championship, a free browser rally game, has a rover of its own; it is fictional, and it is not on this list.
How many rovers are on Mars right now
Three numbers answer the question, each correct for a different reading.
Eight rovers are physically on Mars. Two are Soviet PrOP-Ms from 1971: one wrecked in a crash, one never released from its lander. The other six are Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance and Zhurong.
Six have driven there. Everything on that list except the two PrOP-Ms has put wheels to Martian ground.
Two are working. Curiosity and Perseverance, both NASA, both nuclear-powered. Zhurong has been dormant since May 2022.
Landers that never moved, such as the two Vikings, Phoenix and InSight, are not rovers. Ingenuity is not one either: NASA's helicopter flew 72 times before a damaged rotor blade grounded it in January 2024, but it never had wheels.
All five American rovers, from 10 kg Sojourner to one-tonne Perseverance, roll on six wheels hung from a passive, springless linkage, and how rocker-bogie suspension works explains why nobody has replaced it.
The full list of Mars rovers, active and silent
Every rover that has reached Mars, in landing order, with its status as of September 2026:
| Rover | Agency | Landed | Site | Power | Status, September 2026 | Distance driven |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PrOP-M (Mars 2) | Soviet Union | Nov 1971, crashed | Exact site never found | Cable from lander | Destroyed on impact | 0 m |
| PrOP-M (Mars 3) | Soviet Union | Dec 1971 | Ptolemaeus crater | Cable from lander | Never deployed; lander silent within ≈20 s | 0 m |
| Sojourner | NASA | Jul 1997 | Ares Vallis | Solar | Ended Sep 1997 with its lander | ≈100 m |
| Spirit | NASA | Jan 2004 | Gusev Crater | Solar | Stuck in 2009; silent since Mar 2010 | 7.73 km |
| Opportunity | NASA | Jan 2004 | Meridiani Planum | Solar | Dust storm Jun 2018; ended Feb 2019 | 45.16 km |
| Curiosity | NASA | Aug 2012 | Gale Crater | Radioisotope (Pu-238) | Active; sol 5,000 on 29 Aug 2026 | 37.43 km (14 Jul 2026) |
| Perseverance | NASA | Feb 2021 | Jezero Crater | Radioisotope (Pu-238) | Active; passed marathon distance Jun 2026 | 44.98 km (24 Aug 2026) |
| Zhurong | CNSA (China) | May 2021 | Utopia Planitia | Solar | Dormant since May 2022; has not woken | 1,921 m |
Curiosity's and Perseverance's distances are their latest published readings, and both grow with every drive. The column that best predicts Status is Power: every rover that drove on sunlight has gone quiet.
Which Mars rovers are still active
Two rovers are active on Mars as of September 2026, both American and both still driving.
Curiosity has worked in Gale Crater since August 2012, on a mission first planned for about two years. It logged its 5,000th sol, or Martian day, on 29 August 2026, and NASA's 5,000-sol mission update put it more than 1,000 metres above its landing site, still climbing the layered slopes of Mount Sharp. It has driven more than 37 km.
Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 and now works beyond the crater's western rim. On 14 June 2026, sol 1,890, it passed the marathon distance of 42.195 km, five years and four months in; Opportunity needed 11 years and two months. Its last published reading, 44.98 km on 24 August 2026, left it 180 metres short of Opportunity's 45.16 km, the farthest any vehicle has driven on another world. That is one good drive, so the record may already have changed hands.
Both carry a radioisotope generator that turns the decay heat of plutonium-238 into electricity whatever the sky is doing. The output falls a little every year as the plutonium decays.
Both still drive at a few centimetres per second, and how fast Mars rovers actually go explains why.
The first rover on Mars never drove
The first rovers to reach Mars were Soviet, and neither of them moved. The Mars 2 and Mars 3 landers of 1971 each carried a PrOP-M: a 4.5 kg box on two skis, built to shuffle across the ground at the end of a 15-metre cable with a penetrometer and a radiation densitometer aboard.
Mars 2 crashed on 27 November 1971, which made its lander, rover included, the first human-made object on the surface of Mars. Mars 3 made the first soft landing five days later, on 2 December, began transmitting 90 seconds after touchdown and fell silent within 20 seconds; some accounts say 14.5. Its rover was never deployed. NASA's Mars 3 lander record keeps the timeline.
The first rover to drive on Mars was Sojourner, 26 years later. It rolled off NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander in Ares Vallis after the 4 July 1997 landing: 23 pounds, or about 10 kg, built for seven sols of work and still working 83 sols later, about twelve times its design life. In that time it covered about 100 metres.
Why four rovers that drove went silent
Every rover that has driven on Mars and then gone quiet ran on sunlight, and sunlight is a power supply Mars can take away.
Sojourner stopped because its lander did. The Pathfinder lander was its only relay to Earth, and contact with both ended on 27 September 1997, most likely after the lander's battery gave out.
Spirit drove 7.73 km across Gusev Crater, bogged down in soft soil in 2009 and last called home on 22 March 2010. NASA ended its attempts to reach the rover in May 2011.
Opportunity was designed for 90 sols and 1,000 metres of driving, and managed 45.16 km over more than 14 years. A planet-encircling dust storm cut off its solar power in June 2018, and NASA declared the mission complete on 13 February 2019; that storm is taken apart in Mars dust storms explained.
Zhurong landed in Utopia Planitia in May 2021, drove 1,921 metres, and entered a planned dormancy in May 2022 to wait out winter and the dusty season. It was due to wake in December 2022 and did not. In April 2023 the mission's chief designer, Zhang Rongqiao, said dust on its solar panels had most likely left it without enough power to restart.
A solar rover lives as long as its panels stay clean enough to recharge it, and nothing on Earth controls that. A nuclear rover pays for its power in mass and plutonium; in exchange, Curiosity kept working through the 2018 storm that ended Opportunity.
How many rovers has NASA sent to Mars
NASA has sent five rovers to Mars, and all five landed and drove: Sojourner in 1997, Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, Curiosity in 2012 and Perseverance in 2021. Two of them are still working.
Only two countries have ever driven a rover on Mars: the United States, five times, and China, once.
Sojourner's name, after the Civil War-era reformer Sojourner Truth, came from a 12-year-old's essay, and every NASA rover since has been named by a schoolchild's winning entry in a nationwide contest. Zhurong is named for the Chinese god of fire, a nod to Mars's Chinese name, Huoxing, the fire star.
Which rovers are heading to Mars next
The next rover to leave for the Mars system is not going to Mars. Idefix, a 25 kg rover built by Germany's DLR and France's CNES, rides on Japan's Martian Moons eXploration mission, which DLR says is scheduled to launch on 19 October 2026, 20 October in Japan, on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima. Its target, in 2029, is Phobos, the inner moon described in what Phobos and Deimos look like from Mars, where it would be the first lander ever to touch down.
The next rover due on Mars itself is Europe's Rosalind Franklin. The mission was rebuilt after ESA ended its partnership with Russia in 2022, with a European landing platform and American support: NASA, which supplies the Falcon Heavy launch and the lander's braking engines, approved its share of the work in April 2026. Launch is no earlier than late 2028 and landing at Oxia Planum is planned for 2030; the rover will be the first built to drill as deep as two metres.
China's next Mars mission, Tianwen-3, is a sample return: two launches around the end of 2028 and samples on Earth around 2031. Its published design centres on a lander and an ascent vehicle, not a rover. India's space agency, ISRO, has proposed a Mars lander that would carry a rover and a helicopter.
Where Mars Rally Championship's rover fits
Mars Rally Championship's rover is on none of these lists: it is a fictional, pressurized, four-wheeled rally rover of 3,000 kg with a 90 kWh battery and a 240 km/h speed clamp, closer to the crewed machines in what a crewed, pressurized Mars rover would need than to anything that has landed.
What it borrows from the real rovers is their planet. The rover drives under 3.72 m/s² of gravity, in air at 0.020 kg/m³, and needs about 125 metres to stop from 100 km/h. The ground is sculpted to Martian morphologies rather than surveyed from a landing site, so no real rover's tracks run through it.
Opportunity's lifetime odometer, 45.16 km over 14 years, is about twenty runs of Stage 2, The Long Run, a 2,306-metre timed line; at the gold par of 2:24.2 a run, that is under 50 minutes of driving.
Where to try this
- Free roam — no timer and no checkpoints: the nearest the game comes to a rover's working day, minus the waiting.
- Stage 2, "The Long Run" — 2,306 metres down the full length of a 2.5 km terrain square. One run is longer than Zhurong's entire 1,921-metre traverse.
- Mars Rally Championship is free and runs in a browser tab with no download and no account, on a laptop, a phone in landscape or a school Chromebook, and up to eight pilots can race the same stage live.