TL;DRNASA’s ERNEST rover prototype drove 16 miles in 37 hours during desert testing, hitting 0.6mph. That is 10x faster than Perseverance or Curiosity on Mars.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has built a rover prototype that covered 16 miles in 37 hours of driving, making it roughly 10 times faster than any rover the agency currently operates on Mars. The four-wheeled machine, called ERNEST, reached speeds of up to 0.6mph during a field test in California’s Colorado Desert in March 2026. That pace would be unremarkable for a human on foot, but for a planetary rover it represents a fundamental shift in what robotic exploration could look like.
ERNEST stands for Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain. The prototype is 4 feet long and runs on mesh wheels, a departure from the rigid aluminium wheels that have caused problems on Mars. Its defining feature is an active suspension system with two powered joints per wheel, allowing the rover to lift individual wheels over obstacles, drive sideways, and switch between gaits including what JPL describes as “squirming,” wheel-walking, and obstacle-climbing modes.
A clutch mechanism lets ERNEST toggle between active and passive suspension on the fly. In passive mode, the rover conserves energy on flat terrain. In active mode, it can tackle slopes and obstacles that would stop or strand the rocker-bogie suspension system used on every NASA Mars rover since Sojourner landed in 1997.
