The 20th anniversary of the launch of the first Mars probe was lavishly commemorated by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The European Space Agency (ESA) broadcast the first-ever livestream from Mars, sending images from its Mars Express orbiter to Earth in real time, or as close to real time as is feasible considering that the Red Planet is now roughly 186 million miles (300 million kilometers) away.
ESA’s Mars Express
It takes that long for signals to get between Mars Express and mission control on Earth since that distance amounts to almost 17 light-minutes.
There was no certainty that everything would function successfully on the historic webcast because the team was used to processing and publishing photographs every few days rather than live (or very close to it).
But today, the pictures started to arrive as expected.
This is the first image from it, and it’s the most live that you’ll ever get, until you travel to Mars, to the Red Planet itself, a commentator said seven minutes into the hour-long broadcast, which began at noon EDT (1600 GMT) today.
Images acquired by the probe’s Visual Monitoring Camera showed a somewhat hazy slice of Mars in that one and the ones that came after it over the course of an hour (VMC).
As Mars Express circled the planet, each subsequent shot captured a slightly different perspective of it.
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Engineering Witness to Educational Outreach
The VMC’s principal function was to record the separation of Europe’s Beagle 2 lander, which launched aboard SpaceExpress on June 2, 2003. The VMC was initially intended to be an engineering instrument.
On Christmas Day 2003, that separation took place in it orbit according to plan. Beagle 2 reportedly landed without incident, but it didn’t call home.
Beagle 2’s communications antenna was obstructed by one or more of the lander’s four solar panels that likely failed to deploy correctly, condemning it to an eternity of quiet on the Martian surface.
Shortly after Beagle 2 departed, the mission crew turned off the VMC, but in 2007, they turned it back on as a tool for outreach and teaching. Also, the camera was there to record scientific observations.
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