This is John Bachelor, conversation with my colleague Bob Zimmerman, the fate of Ingenuity,

the Flying Toaster, now landed permanently on Mars until they build the Smithsonian on Mars around it.

Ingenuity has a new mission I learned from Bob. It is not at all deceased. It is just no longer able to fly. It broke a rotor. So the mission is set out by the engineers, the clever

engineers, to watch and wait. Bob explains here, the future of its ingenuity is information, information,

information.

Its part of Mars will be documented until ingenuity falls exhausted.

Bob Zimmerman, behind the black.

Well, the last software update is interesting because what they've done is they have set ingenuity to turn itself on every day, check its status, its sole panel will continue to collect

data, so there's no reason why it cannot turn it on every day, gather data on the environment around it, such as

temperature and weather, and also take a picture of the ground, even though the ground

it's only one straight down,

but you get a picture every day of that same spot and see if any changes happen, and it's going to do this

continuously, and they think it can gather as much as 20 years worth of data daily over time and the idea of doing this is they

figure that someday in the future somebody's going to come by in a position to

download that data and that'll give them a fantastic in a And so that's what they're doing. So even though ingenuity is now God, shut down or at least is not in communications anymore,

it will continue to work into the long future job.

More of this later detail.