The team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) responsible for the Mars helicopter mission Creativitygathered in the control room on April 16 to say goodbye to the drone. Although Ingenuity’s mission officially ended on January 25, the rotorcraft continued to communicate with the Perseverance rover, which served as Ingenuity’s base station.

Now that Perseverance has left its eternal parking lot CreativityEngineers decided it wasn’t worth throwing around such a cool piece of equipment as the Mars helicopter, so they gave the device updated software that would allow the helicopter to continue collecting data even after communication with the rover was lost.

Ingenuity will “wake up” each day, activate its onboard systems and check solar panel performance, battery charging and electronics. Additionally, the helicopter will photograph the planet’s surface and collect temperature data from sensors placed throughout the rotorcraft.

Engineers and scientists believe that such long-term data collection could not only benefit designers of future vehicles but also yield data on weather conditions on Mars. Engineers calculated that Ingenuity’s memory should last for 20 years of daily data collection.

Let me remind you that Ingenuity was originally designed for five flights across the sky of the Red Planet, but made 72 flights. Instead of just a few minutes, the device spent almost 129 hours (two hours, eight minutes and 55 seconds) on Mars. weather. The total flight range was 17,242 meters and the maximum altitude was 24 meters.