This business of we've only planned 4-5 flights in the main mission but will extend by 30 more days seems like intentional under-committment to me. NASA seems to have done this with most of the previous rover missions as well - all of them significantly extended missions.<p>Maybe there's politics around funding. I wouldn't be surprised if the major costs are people costs over months and sometimes years to support the science vs. the actual core mission costs but it may be a big sticker shock to ask the Congress at one go. So possibly they ask funding for a short under balled-mission (which no one really scrutinizes) and then keep getting funding extensions citing opportunity costs (the probe is already on Mars, we can get extended value etc). I can imagine there's massive politics here, so it maybe is the only smart game to play
Here's the press announcement from NASA directly. It has even more information:<p><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-to-begin-new-demonstration-phase/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-hel...</a>
I'm honestly more interested in the failure mode that ingenuity eventually meets. Something lame like a human error in flight planning? Cosmic ray annihilating a critical component? Or maybe even martian dust destroying its delicate surfaces and bearings. So many new problems after only having stationary/wheeled rovers for so long
Does NASA just set very limited goals for public performance/political reasons? As most missions seem to amazingly blow past these initial expectations.<p>I get that NASA has some brilliant people, but I struggle to believe that the initial mission times that NASA gives are genuine estimates of what is achievable. Everything always exceeds expectations. Maybe that is just the prevailing culture as we expect everything to exceed expectations.
> The plan [...] to take 60 black-and-white images and five colour images<p>Why black and white? Why not all colour? What constraint are they working around? Storage? Camera speed?