The European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first Mars probe in style.
ESA conducted the first-ever “livestream from Mars” today (June 2), showing images back home from its Mars Express orbiter in real time — or as close to real time as it can possibly get, since the The Red Planet is currently 186 million miles (300 million kilometers) from Earth.
That distance translates to about 17 light-minutes — meaning that’s how long communications travel between Mars Express and mission control here on Earth.
Related: Images of the Red Planet by Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft
The Mars Express team worked for months to develop the tools to make today’s livestream possible, ESA officials said.
This is new territory — the team is used to processing and releasing images every few days, not live (or close to it) — so there’s no guarantee that everything will work smoothly with the unprecedented webcast. But the pictures came right on schedule today.
“Ooh! Here it is! This is the first picture from Mars, and it’s the most live you’ll get, unless you travel to Mars, the Red Planet itself,” said a commentator about seven minutes into the ESA-long webcast, which began at noon EDT (1600 GMT) today.
That image, and those that followed over time, showed a faint slice of Mars captured by the probe’s Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC). Each successive image captured a slightly different view of the planet as Mars Express moved around it.
The VMC was originally designed to be an engineering instrument; its main job was to document the separation of Europe’s Beagle 2 lander, which launched with Mars Express on June 2, 2003.
That separation took place on schedule in Mars orbit on Christmas Day 2003. Beagle 2 appeared to have landed safely, but it failed to call home. Investigators later determined that one or more of the lander’s four solar panels likely had not deployed properly, blocking Beagle 2’s communications and causing an eternal silence on the Martian surface.
The mission team shut down the VMC shortly after Beagle 2’s liftoff but turned it back on in 2007 to serve as an education and outreach tool. The camera also came to make scientific observations as well.
“We developed a new, more sophisticated method of operations and image processing, to get better results from the camera, making it the eighth science instrument of Mars Express,” VMC team member Jorge Hernández Bernal said in a statement on Wednesday (May 31).
Mars Express gained a lot from those instruments during its nearly two decades on the Red Planet. For example, the orbiter sniffed methane in the thin Martian atmosphere, found a possible salty lake under Mars’ south pole and mapped the composition of ice at both poles of the planet.
“These findings have far-reaching implications,” ESA officials said wrote in a statement today. “Since water is an essential ingredient for the existence of life as we know it, Mars Express has sparked further interest in future missions to the Red Planet, focused on exploring the possibility of past or present microbial life.”
Mars Express remains in good health, and its discoveries should continue to progress: ESA recently extended its mission until at least 2026.
