For the first time, ever, ‘live’ images from the planet Mars were set to stream here on Earth Friday via the Visual Monitoring Camera on board the European Space Agency’s mars orbiter.
This livestream event was planned as a celebration of Mars Express’ 20th anniversary. Since it was sent to the Red Planet in 2003, the Mars Express has “provided breathtaking views of Mars in three dimensions,” said the ESA.
In fact, it “has provided the most complete map of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, studied Mars’s innermost moon Phobos in unprecedented detail, and traced the history of water across the globe, demonstrating that Mars once harbored environmental conditions that may have been suitable for life,” said the agency.
However, all images collected from Mars before Friday were from the past, said the ESA.
“Depending on the two planets’ relative positions in orbit around the Sun, this can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes,” said the ESA of how long it can take images of Mars to reach Earth. “In this way, there’s actually no such thing as ‘live’ news in space as we are limited by the speed of light traversing great distances.”
During the hour-long livestream Friday, new pictures from Mars were set to stream to earthlings roughly every 50 seconds “as they’re beamed down directly,” from the camera, said the ESA. The time from when the images are captured to when they appear on screens will be around 18 minutes – 17 for light to travel from Mars to Earth and one for the data to pass through wires and servers on the ground.
You can watch the livestream here at 12 p.m. ET:
“This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometers from Earth – this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100% certain it’ll work,” explained James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. “But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”
When the Visual Monitoring Camera was launched 20 years ago, it was not intended to be used for a livestream event. It was actually sent to space to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the ‘MEX’ spacecraft. After being off for years, it was turned back on in 2007 for outreach activities.
“It got its own Flickr page and the Mars Webcam was born (note: the Twitter account has now moved to Mastodon),” said the ESA. “Only later, scientists realized that these images could be used for ‘proper’ science.”
Live updates on the stream can be found at @esaoperations on Twitter and with the hashtag #MarsLIVE.
Related
Related
