Now, things really got serious. This Friday (2), the first live transmission from Mars was carried out by the European Space Agency (ESA). Yes one live directly from the red planet!
For an hour, the space agency’s YouTube channel streamed images of Mars captured by the Visual Monitoring Camera aboard ESA’s long-lived and still highly productive Mars orbiter, called the Mars Express. A live took place in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the unmanned space mission, carried out by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, aimed at studying the planet Mars.
“This is an old camera, originally intended for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometers from Earth. This has never been tried before, and to be honest, we’re not 100% sure it will work. But, I’m quite optimistic. Normally, we see images of Mars and know they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now,” explained James Godfrey, Manager of Spacecraft Operations at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, when communicating the idea.
And it worked. Most observations and data collected by spacecraft are made when they are not in direct contact with a ground station antenna. Either because of geometry (on the other side of the Sun or Mars, for example) or because the spacecraft’s antenna is pointing away from Earth when collecting scientific data.
For science, this is not a problem. The data is stored on board and transmitted a few hours or even days later, once the spacecraft is in contact with the ground again. What typically happens with the Visual Monitoring Camera on the Mars Express is that every other day a new batch is “downloaded”, processed and made available to the world.
As a result, scientists pore over incoming data for years, discovering new secrets about the universe. This process makes live footage quite rare, leaving the ESA with only evidence of what Mars looked like in the past.
There are only a few examples in spaceflight history that filmed events in real time, most notably the Apollo missions, which sent back spectacular video showing astronauts walking on the surface of the Moon. But, they all happened very close to Earth. Others, more distant, sent an image or two in near real time. When it comes to a long live stream from deep space, this was a first.
During this Friday’s live broadcast, the time between images being taken from orbit around Mars and appearing on the screen was about 18 minutes. It takes 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in its current configuration, and about a minute to pass through wires and servers on the ground.
Change of plans
The Mars Express Visual Surveillance Camera, nicknamed the Mars Webcam, was not intended for this purpose. His main job 20 years ago was to monitor the separation of the Lander Beagle 2 probe from the MEX spacecraft. After doing that and reporting the facts, she was turned off.
This camera was not intended to be a scientific instrument and did not need to capture accurate images. In 2007, it was reactivated and used for scientific and outreach activities, including campaigns to encourage space enthusiasts and schools to propose observations of Mars.
She even got her own Flickr page. And so the Mars Webcam was born.
“We developed new and more sophisticated methods of operation and image processing to obtain better results from the camera, transforming it into the 8th scientific instrument of the Mars Express”, explains Jorge Hernández Bernal, from the VMC team.
In celebration of the long and productive life of the Mars Express, teams have spent the last few months testing tools that would allow scientifically processed images to be broadcast in high quality, live, for a full hour.
If you missed the broadcast, you can watch it now on YouTube. Check it out below.
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