ESA celebrates the birthday of its Mars Express camera with an exciting opportunity to see live images of the Red Planet
For the first time ever, people across the world will be able to see live images of Mars as seen by the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Mars Express.
Mars Express is an orbiter that has been in operation for two decades to the day: Friday 2 June marks its 20th birthday.
The livestream will begin at 5pm BST (9am PT or 12pm ET) and will last for one hour, with new images every 50 seconds.
So where can you watch it? The livestream will be available on ESA’s YouTube channel, or directly below.
Live updates will be sent from the ESA Operations Twitter account.
How live is ‘live’?
‘Live’ is a tricky word when it comes to space. Given that light has to travel such vast distances, the images we get in space have already taken place in the past.
What’s more, most observations in space are made when spacecraft are not in direct contact with Earth’s antennas. This might be because the spacecraft is on the other side of a planet (or on the other side of the Sun to Earth), or because their antennas are pointing away from us.
In fact, the live video sent back from missions like the Apollo moon landings are still relatively rare in the realms of space footage – it’s only because the Moon is closer to home that this was possible.
On 2 June, ESA’s Mars Express will be beaming new images across every 50 seconds with its Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) – which will appear on your screen 18 minutes after they have been taken in space.
According to ESA, “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.”
“We’ve never tried anything like this before”
Because anything close to live footage is quite hard to come by in space, there is little precedent for a livestream of this kind – and there’s every chance that things might not go as planned.
The ESA state that they have “never tried anything like this before”, so the exact times the signals will take to travel may change.
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“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 per cent certain it’ll work,” explains 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!”
What is the Mars Express mission?
Mars Express was launched on 2 June 2003, arriving at Mars in December of the same year.
The VMC or ‘Mars Webcam’ was originally sent out to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft 20 years ago. After this it was turned off – but was turned back on in 2007 when scientists realised it could be of more use to science.
Over the last 20 years, the Mars Webcam has provided the most complete map of the Red Planet’s atmosphere’s chemical composition, while also tracing the history of water on Mars. This information helped to demonstrate that Mars could once have sustained life.
Read more:
- Europe’s Martian orbiter releases incredible pictures of the Red Planet’s ‘Grand Canyon’
- Instant Genius Podcast: Life on Mars, with Lewis Dartnell
- Signs of ancient flowing water found on Mars