Comment Re:why does it need to store the data? (Score 3, Informative) 27
Why can't it just send it back to the base station there and have it forwarded back to earth?
The Perseverance rover is the base station for Ingenuity. They talk to each other over Zigbee, and so they have to be reasonably close. There have occasionally been times when it was feared Ingenuity was lost, but we got it back when Perseverance got out from behind a rock or something, and had a clearer line-of-sight.
But Perseverance can't sit around communicating with Ingenuity forever: it has its own mission to continue and will travel tens of kilometers away from Ingenuity's final resting stop.