For the first time in human history, we have witnessed a livestream from Mars.
To celebrate the 20th birthday of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express, people are able to get as close as it’s currently possible to a live view from Mars.
New pictures roughly every 50 seconds are being beamed down directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera on board ESA’s long-lived martian orbiter.
“This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometres from Earth – this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100 percent certain it’ll work,” explains James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
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“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!”
During Friday's (2 June) one-hour livestream, the time between the images being taken from orbit around Mars and appearing on your screen will be about 18 minutes, the ESA said.
That’s 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in their current configuration, and about one minute to pass through the wires and servers on the ground.
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The first image we have received so far, at the time of writing:
Although the pic itself is a bit underwhelming, don't forget that the distance from Earth to Mars is 302.4 million km and to get clear resolution images transferred to earth is not easy.
"Most observations and data gathered by spacecraft are taken during periods when they are not in direct contact with a ground station antenna on Earth," the ESA explained.
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"Either because of geometry – for example, on the other side of the Sun or Mars – or the spacecraft’s antenna is pointing away from Earth while gathering science data.
"For science, this is no problem.
"The data is stored on board and beamed down a few hours or even days later, once the spacecraft is in contact with the ground again.
"What normally happens for the Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express, is every couple of days a new batch are ‘downlinked’, processed and made available to the world."
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For the latest images from Mars, take a look at ESA's livestream in the link below:
Update: there is apparently bad weather from the receiving station 'which is corrupting the reception of the signal'.
Topics: Space, Technology
Anish Vij