The flight will also take place under the watchful camera of the Perseverance rover, parked about 200 feet (60 meters) away from Ingenuity's launch site.

Related: How to watch the Mars helicopter Ingenuity's first flight online .

"Naturally the team is working really hard to be ready for that moment [of flight], so when we see that first data, that it works … it will be an incredible moment," said Tim Canham, Ingenuity operations lead, during a livestreamed press conference from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, on Friday (April 9).

MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL, said she will be most excited by the black-and-white camera images that the helicopter will ferry back to Earth, showing its view from the air.

If Ingenuity makes it and transmits data as planned, the black-and-white downward-facing camera images will be taken about 30 times a second and have the capability to track features on the surface; in the long run, once all these images get down to Earth, controllers will be able to estimate rate and direction of motion by looking at feature drift. .

There will also be a 13-megapixel camera on Ingenuity pointing towards the horizon, which will take a few pictures during the flight.

The helicopter team has 30 Martian sols (roughly 31 days on Earth) to take the first tentative flights.

Assuming Ingenuity survives the first flight, it will rest and transmit data before attempting a second flight with lateral movement.

The engineers thus know it is theoretically possible to fly on Mars, and have a weather station available on Perseverance to approve or wave off the flight given current conditions, but there is still the element of uncertainty in the moment.

For example, the planned five-minute flight video from the rover, in 4K definition, would take months to send back to Earth given the bandwidth availability from the Martian surface through the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to NASA's Deep Space Network of dishes that pick up information from distant spacecraft.

The Mastcam-Z panoramic camera team is also simulating taking footage from afar, aiming to get Ingenuity exactly in frame from a distance, as it aims to capture zoomed-in and zoomed-out footage at the same time. .

Already practice is taking place; Mastcam-Z sent back a short video of the helicopter revving up its blade to 50 revolutions per second, but that was on the ground. .

Mastcam-Z is designed for large swaths of terrain, while Ingenuity's flight will only take place in a tiny portion of the overall camera frame's view!