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JULY-AUGUST 2022 N ASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image in the northwest portion of a region of Mars known as “Séítah” using its high-resolution color camera during its 20 th flight on Feb. 25, 2022. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] Flight 3 was a pure distance run, with Ingenuity covering in 52 sec- onds the distance the Sojourner rover from the Mars Pathfinder Mis- sion covered in 83 sols. With these three successes behind it, the mission entered a brief tran- sitional period from demonstration to operation. After resolving an on- board software problem that post- poned its first attempt, Flight 4, famous for the video and audio Per- severance captured, included color images taken of the Martian surface at the farthest distance traveled during the nearly two-minute flight. Finally, with flight 5, Ginny landed at a different location 130 meters to the south of Wright Brothers Field – designated Airfield B. With hovering, flight, landing, im- aging, and communications all in place, Ingenuity entered its opera- tional demonstration phase with flight 6, where the helicopter was now charged with scouting terrain for Perseverance. With this change in phase also, ironically, came a re- duction in Perseverance resources dedicated to monitoring Ingenuity’s progress. As stated by Jennifer Tro- sper, JPL Deputy Project Manager for Perseverance, “What we aren’t going to be doing anymore, which took an enormous amount of time, is imaging the helicopter flights. That is what took away from our ability to continue with the [Perse- verance] science mission in one way or another.” With its mission goal the search for signs of life some- where in Mars’ ancient past, it is dif- ficult to argue the point. This is not to say that the two would not be in regular communication, nor ever very far from one another physi- cally. The low-power monopole an- tennas on Ginny and Percy are only rated for communications at dis- tances as far as 1 km, and Ginny- NASA communications rely on Percy’s communication with the Mars Relay Network, which consists of NASA orbiters Mars Reconnais- sance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and MAVEN, as well as ESA orbiters Exo- Mars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express. With this transition to supporting the rover mission, flights became more of a means to an end than the experiments themselves. Flights 7 and 8 were used to reach Séítah, an ancient formation within Jezero Crater that served as the location of the first Perseverance science cam- paign. According to Kevin Hand, co-lead of the Perseverance ex- ploratory phase of this region, Séí- tah (and the Crater Floor Fractured Rough region) “was under at least 100 meters of water 3.8 billion years