For the past 20 years, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express has been orbiting the Red Planet, sending valuable data back to Earth that reveals the landscape of Mars. All of our ideas about Mars have always been slightly behind in time due to technical delays taking minutes, hours, and sometimes days to be broadcast back to Earth. This will change with the first live broadcast from the Red Planet.
On Friday, ESA will host a live stream of images taken by Mars Express to celebrate the orbiter’s anniversary, as announced by the space agency this week. The images will be streamed directly from the onboard monitoring camera (VMC), also known as the Mars Webcam, and a new image will be shown approximately every 50 seconds for the duration of the one-hour event.
The live broadcast is scheduled to start at 19:00 Moscow time on June 2. You can tune into the Martian broadcast through the ESA YouTube channel.
The Mars webcam was originally created for one task: to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the Mars Express spacecraft. After she transmitted her first data, the Mars Webcam was disabled. However, after about four years, the camera was turned on again, first for educational purposes, and then repurposed as a scientific instrument in its own right.
We’ve developed new, more sophisticated methods of working and processing images to get better results from the camera, making it the eighth scientific instrument of Mars Express.
— Jorge Hernandez Bernal, VMC team member, in an ESA statement
Camera images of Mars are stored aboard the spacecraft and transmitted to mission control in batches every few days. Then they are processed and made available for viewing. This is typical of most spacecraft as most data collection occurs when they are not in direct contact with the earth’s antenna. According to the ESA, the spacecraft could be on the other side of Mars or the Sun, or their antennae could point away from Earth.
That’s why when we see an image of a celestial body, it doesn’t always reflect what it looks like at that very moment. Instead of Instagram Live, we usually get a “late gram” or one of those photo dumps that show highlights from a few weeks ago.
During the one-hour live broadcast, we will be able to see images taken from the orbit of Mars just 18 minutes before they appear on our screens. That’s how long it takes to send a signal from Mars to Earth, plus another minute to transfer data through wires and servers on Earth.
