The European Space Agency (ESA) will livestream imagery from its Mars Express orbiter in near-real time today (June 2), and you may watch it live.
The event, held to have fun the twentieth anniversary of Mars Express’ launch, will begin today at noon EDT (1600 GMT) and last an hour. Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of ESA, or directly via the space agency.
“This might be the closest you may get to a live view from the Red Planet,” ESA officials said in an announcement.
Mars Express’ images will get to Earth today 18 minutes after they’re snapped, if all goes based on plan, they added. It’s going to take 17 minutes for them to get to our planet from Mars, then one other minute or so to make it through servers and wires on the bottom.
Mars Express launched with a lander called Beagle 2 on June 2, 2003. The duo arrived in orbit across the Red Planet on Christmas Day of that 12 months.
Beagle 2 touched down on Mars that very same day but never phoned home, apparently because a number of of its 4 solar panels didn’t deploy properly and ended up blocking the lander’s communications antenna.
Mars Express, nonetheless, got up and running as planned, studying the Red Planet intimately with seven different science instruments.
The orbiter has achieved a terrific deal during its 20 years away from Earth. For instance, it detected methane within the Martian atmosphere, mapped the composition of ice near the planet’s poles and spotted a possible subsurface lake near Mars’ south pole. And Mars Express remains to be going strong, as today’s event shows.
The livestream will showcase images snapped by the probe’s Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), which was originally designed to observe the separation of Beagle 2. Once it did that, the VMC was turned off — nevertheless it was turned back on in 2007 to snap imagery for education and outreach activities, and for science work as well.
“We developed recent, more sophisticated methods of operations and image processing, to improve results from the camera, turning it into Mars Express’ eighth science instrument,” VMC team member Jorge Hernández Bernal said in the identical statement.
Mars Express team members have spent the previous couple of months preparing for today’s livestream — as an example, developing the tools needed to get the VMC photos online as soon as possible.
Do not be surprised if there are a number of hiccups, nonetheless.
“That is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of virtually 3 million kilometers [1.8 million miles] from Earth — this hasn’t been tried before and, to be honest, we’re not 100% certain it’ll work.” James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center Darmstadt, Germany, said in the identical statement.
“But I’m pretty optimistic,” he added. “Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars because it is now — as near a Martian ‘now’ as we will possibly get!”