However, for NASA, there's one little glitch in the celebratory mood: no one knows exactly what the old record is. In the early 1970s, the Russians went to the Moon, but with the Lunokhod series of rovers. One of them, Lunokhod 2, traveled approximately 23 miles from its landing site. Unfortunately, thanks to limitations in technology, an exact distance is difficult to determine. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, who is also Opportunity's principal investigator, said that "they didn't really have any good orbital images in which to operate [Lunokhod 2], so their estimate, which has been published for many years, of 37 kilometers is highly uncertain," later adding that “we have enormous...
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