Jacob Pinter

One thing is that it's got microphones aboard and Curious Universe released the very first sound recordings from Mars back in 2021, which is just cool.

Yeah, but it's just mind-blowing that we can hear this other planet, right?

And at the risk of maybe asking a silly question, what makes this so hard?

I am.

I mean, I can't fly a helicopter on this planet or any other one, but I can sort of imagine it on Earth.

You know, you're sitting in a cockpit, you're reacting to things in real time.

When you're talking about ingenuity and flying a helicopter on Mars, there's that time delay, right?

It takes up to 40 minutes for a message to get to Mars and back.

And that means that from Earth, Hovard is not flying in real time, right?

It's such a cool case study, the fact that this Mars helicopter almost didn't happen at all, and then it turned out to work way better than anyone expected.

It just proves what happens at NASA over and over.

You've got this problem that seems like it's really hard or maybe even impossible.

You put some NASA experts on it, and it doesn't stay impossible for long.

It's just what NASA does.

And this is where we get to say the future is actually not that far off, right?

NASA already has plans not to send another Ingenuity, but a whole fleet of Ingenuity-class rovers to explore Mars.

It's a mission called Skyfall.

So we've got this robot hard at work.

And Christian, we talked about those big goals that NASA had with the Mars Rover program from the very beginning, like finding signs of water, finding evidence of the conditions for life.

And then that big challenge, finding proof of ancient life.