On June 2, 2023, to celebrate the 20th birthday of ESA’s Mars Express, you’ll have the chance to get as close as it’s currently possible get to a live view from the Red Planet. Tune in to be amongst the first to see new pictures roughly every 50 seconds as they’re beamed down directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera on board Mars Express. One-hour livestream starts on the ESA YouTube channel 12:00 p.m. ET (18:00 CEST, 17:00 BST).
“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,” members of the Mars Express team said in a statement.
“Either because of geometry 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 Mars Express’ Visual Monitoring Camera, dubbed the Mars Webcam, is every couple of days a new batch are downlinked, processed and made available to the world.
“In fact, there are only a few examples in the history of spaceflight; including NASA’s DART and LCROSS missions which filmed the view as they intentionally crashed into asteroid Dimorphos and the Moon, respectively, and of course, the Apollo missions sent back spectacular live video that captured the globe, showing astronauts walking on the Moon’s surface,” they noted.
“These missions were all pretty close to home and others farther away sent perhaps an image or two in near real-time. When it comes to a lengthy livestream from deep space, this is a first.”
During today’s livestream, the time between the images being taken from orbit around Mars and appearing on your screen will be about 18 minutes.
That’s 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in their current…
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