The 4-pound helicopter has successfully flown eight times on Mars as of June 21, according to an update from Teddy Tzanetos, the helicopter operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The watchdog issue occurred before Ingenuity’s first flight in April. Essentially, this watchdog timer acts like a safe mode when it detects a timing issue, preventing the helicopter’s software from moving into flight mode and allowing the chopper blades to reach full speed or ascend.

While a temporary workaround was developed to bypass this issue, it was still possible that the watchdog timer would go off 15% of the time.

Last week, the helicopter’s team successfully deployed a flight software update to Ingenuity to permanently fix the issue, providing more reliability as future flights are planned.

“Flight 8 confirmed that the FC flight software update was a success and that Ingenuity is ready to proceed with confidence into the next flights of the ops demo,” according to an update from Tzanetos.

Ingenuity is also due for a navigation computer software update that will fix the issue that occurred during the chopper’s sixth flight. Images captured by the navigation camera, which feed into the helicopter’s navigation computer, had timing delays. Those images help Ingenuity to track its location, among other critical factors during flight. When the incorrect times and images were associated, it caused the chopper to wobble in the air.

Ingenuity was able to land safely, but the team wants to prevent the issue from happening again so the chopper doesn’t spiral out of control. It’s also why the helicopter didn’t capture any color images during its last two flights.

“This update will provide a mechanism for the Helicopter to detect and correct when image timestamps in the pipeline become out-of-synch/are dropped/skipped, while also re-enabling the capture of high-resolution 13-megapixel color images. This update is planned to occur in the coming days, followed by Ingenuity’s ninth flight on Mars,” Tzanetos wrote.

Although Ingenuity has already achieved the goals initially set by its team during its first few flights, the chopper continues to push the limits of what it can do — and tag along with the Perseverance rover as it explores the site of an ancient lake bed on Mars.