Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) will live stream images from the Mars Express orbiting satellite in near real time. The livestream he will begin on June 2nd at 12pm EDT. You can watch the 1 hour live stream on the ESA. YouTube channel.
Mars Express has been orbiting Mars for the past 20 years, sending back data about the Martian vast landscape along the way. Minor technical delays have hampered these observations, and it can take hours, or even days, for images to be sent to Earth.
[Related: The Mars Express just got up close and personal with Phobos.]
That changes in today’s historic livestream. If all goes according to plan, today’s image will reach Earth about 18 minutes after it was taken. It takes him 17 minutes for light to reach Earth from Mars, and then about a minute to pass through servers and wiring on the ground.
According to ESA“This will be the closest thing to a live view from the Red Planet.”
New images are displayed approximately every 50 seconds as they are sent directly from the orbiter. visual surveillance camera (VMC).
June 2, 2003, Mars Express begins operation They arrived in orbit on December 25, 2003, and Beagle 2 landed on the ground the same day. But Beagle 2 never made contact with Earth because at least one of her four solar panels failed to deploy properly, blacking out the lander’s communications antenna.
The Mars Express still went according to plan and began investigating Heavenly Neighbors using seven different instruments. In 20 years, the Orbiter already achieved a lotThis includes detecting methane in the Martian atmosphere, discovering possible underground lakes near the Martian south pole, and mapping the composition of ice near the Martian poles.
VMC, or Mars Webcam, It wasn’t originally planned to break so many records. Its main job was only to monitor the detachment of the Beagle 2 Lander and Mars Her Express spacecraft. After completing the first mission, the camera was turned off.
In 2007, VMC was turned on again and used for science and research. Educational outreach activities. Take advantage of the social media boom of the decade to create your own flicker page and twitter account now moved to Mastodon. Scientists realized a little later that these images could be used for “proper” science.
[Related: The ill-fated Beagle 2 may have landed on Mars after all.]
“We have developed new, more sophisticated operating and image processing methods to get better results from the camera, turning it into the eighth scientific instrument of Mars Express,” said a VMC team member. Jorge Hernandez Bernal said. said in a statement. “We discovered many things from these images, including the evolution of unusual elongated cloud formations hovering 20km above one of Mars’ most famous volcanoes.” [12 miles] Alicia Mons. “
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mars Express, multiple ESA teams have spent months developing a tool that will enable live streaming of high-quality, scientifically-processed imagery on Earth for an hour.
“This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, about 3 million kilometers away.” [18 million miles] A probe from Earth has never been attempted before, and to be honest, I’m not 100 percent sure it will work,” said James, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s Mission Control Center in Darmstadt, Germany. says Godfrey. said in a statement. “But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, when we look at an image from Mars, we know it was taken a few days ago.” I’m looking forward to getting closer to “now”! “
