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NASA expected its Mars helicopter80p Archives Ingenuity, to last for five flights. It's now flown a whopping 54 times.

The space agency released footage from the small experimental robot's early August journey through the Red Planet's Jezero Crater, a region that once teemed with water. While 16 feet in the air, the chopper saw its exploration partner, the car-sized Perseverance Rover, which had recently captured an image of Ingenuity.

"Look who it is! I recently drove right past Ingenuity and got a pic after it ended its 53rd flight early," NASA posted from its Perseverance Twitter account. "Happy to say it’s since completed a 54th flight to check out its systems. (Even caught a glimpse of me too!)"

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SEE ALSO: NASA's rover photo shows water once absolutely gushed on Mars

On Ingenity's previous (53rd flight), the helicopter flew for an impressive 466 feet before automatically landing. Ingenuity has a software program, aptly named "LAND_NOW," that will tell the craft to land if it senses a number of abnormal conditions. In this case, NASA engineers suspect the helicopter's flight images didn't accurately sync up with information about Ingenuity's speed and motion.

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"While we hoped to never trigger a LAND_NOW, this flight is a valuable case study that will benefit future aircraft operating on other worlds," Teddy Tzanetos, who works on the Inguenity mission, said in a statement.

In the top of this image taken by the Ingenuity helocopter, you can see the six-wheeled Perservance rover. On left is the end of a helicopter leg. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech The Ingenuity helicopter on the Mars desert floor following its shortened 53rd flight. Credit: JPL / Caltech-ASU / MSSS

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The Perseverance rover, with some bonus help from Ingenuity — the first craft to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — is on a mission largely devoted to finding signs of past primitive life on the Martian surface. This could mean telltale pieces of genetic material, or parts of a degraded cell.

So far, there's no proof life ever existed on Mars — or anywhere beyond Earth for that matter. One day, however, scientists may have the opportunity to look deep below the Martian ground, a place that could have hosted life for much longer than the profoundly dry, cold, and irradiated surface.

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