Live Broadcast from Mars: ESA Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Mars Express Project

RIAULINK.COM – For the first time in history, there will be a live broadcast from Mars on Friday (2/6). The European Space Agency (ESA) will do an hour-long live stream on YouTube, bringing viewers up close and personal with the Red Planet.

ESA is holding this live stream to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mars Express, ESA’s ongoing project to understand more deeply the closest planet to Earth.

Images from Mars will be beamed directly to Earth via the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) aboard the orbiter, showing Mars from afar in all its glory.

Since the mission lasted for nearly two decades, this is the first time a live broadcast has taken place. Although the equipment used is quite old, the team hopes to capture good images.

“This is an old camera, originally planned for technical purposes, at a distance of almost 3 million kilometers from Earth – this has never been attempted before and to be honest, we are not one hundred percent sure it will work,” explained the Manager of Spacecraft Operations at ESA’s mission control center. in Darmstadt, James Godfrey in his statement, quoted from IFL Science, Thursday (1/6).

“But I’m very optimistic. Normally, we look at images from Mars and know they were taken days earlier. I can’t wait to see Mars today, as close to ‘now’ Mars as we can get!” he continued.

This program is indeed called a “live broadcast”, but there will be a slight delay due to the time it takes for light to travel the enormous distance between Earth and Mars. The distance depends on the orbits of the two planets, but averages about 225 million kilometers.

The time between images taken from orbit around Mars and appearing on viewers’ screens is roughly 18 minutes: about 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth, and another minute to pass through cables and servers on the ground.