Of livestream made use of images from the ‘Mars Express’. That is a spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) that was launched in 2003 by a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan.
Delay
The images were broadcast to Earth with a delay. It took nearly 17 minutes for each image to reach Earth. There was therefore almost 300 million kilometers between the Earth and the spacecraft.
The live stream lasted an hour. The planet was shown from multiple angles as the spacecraft orbited Mars. Some images clearly showed white clouds.
Rare
It’s not often that space can be tracked live from a spacecraft. Normally, photos and other data are stored on board and later sent to Earth, once the craft’s antenna can be pointed at Earth.
Images that come in live from space – except for 17 minutes – are ‘quite rare’, according to the ESA. More than half a century ago, Apollo 8 also broadcast live images. The ESA calls an hour-long live stream like today ‘a first’.
2023-06-02 21:08:59
#hour #live #images #Mars
