Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its final flight through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, engineers and scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) presented an update on the drone at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Engineers reported that all sensor, battery and avionics systems remained intact and worked perfectly after the hard landing that occurred after the vehicle’s 72nd flight in mid-January 2024. So Ingenuity will continue to operate as a weather station of sorts, recording telemetry, taking images every sol (solar day on Mars) and storing them in its memory.

According to engineers, Ingenuity will be able to operate this way for another 20 years. But scientists won’t have a chance to retrieve this data in the coming years because the Perseverance rover, through which Ingenuity communicates with Earth to send data, is currently three kilometers away from the drone.

Experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said they worked for months to determine the cause of the Ingenuity crash. They concluded that the helicopter’s onboard navigation sensors were unable to discern the texture characteristics of the Martian surface to accurately determine its location, so the rover crashed into the planet’s surface when it landed. In any case, the Ingenuity program has been incredibly successful. The helicopter was designed to make five flights to Mars and ultimately made 72 flights.