To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Mars Express Orbiter, the European Space Agency broadcast the first-ever Mars livestream, in a historic event that took place over the course of an hour on Friday, June 3. A newly released animation shows a sped-up version of how the livestream unfolded.
During the live stream, images arrive once every 50 seconds, as onboard the orbiter The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) captured the images from Mars’ orbit. Unfortunately, there is a visible gap in the middle, the result of rain at ESA’s ground station in Cebreros, Spain, which interfered with telemetry from the orbiter. Engineers are still in the process of trying to recover the missing images, according to an ESA press release.
The experiment exposed several neat Martian features, including atmospheric phenomena.
“Mars is now approaching the southern winter season,” explained VMC team member Jorge Hernández Bernal in the same press release. “The South Polar cap is evident in these images, near the polar night, while the Arsia Mons volcano is present on the left side of the planet. Orographic clouds are also common around this time, and form as the atmosphere flows through the mountain and volcanic slopes.”
On the right side of the video, another cloud can be seen near the polar cap, Bernal added. The team conducted a comprehensive study of high-altitude clouds during the twilight period using the VMC, showing their distribution in this particular region of the planet during this period.
Achieving this milestone proved to be a huge task, as the VMC required a view of the planet at the same time as the orbiter’s antenna was constantly facing Earth in order to instantly stream data home. Typically, observations are stored onboard the spacecraft and sent in a batch to Earth, which can take hours and even days.
“Typically, it is not possible to point the spacecraft’s instruments at Mars and the communications antenna at Earth at the same time,” said James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager for Mars Express, in the press release. “But a few weeks ago, when we were looking for ideas on how to celebrate the anniversary, we realizeded that Mars would pass through VMC’s field of view during a communications pass and the idea was born.”
These aren’t the most spectacular visuals we’ve ever seen on Mars, but this experiment gives us the feeling that we’re bridging the gap between Earth and the Red Planet even further.
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