2023-06-02 16:11:00
The Mars Express of the European Space Agency (ESA or European Space Agency) has been orbiting the planet Mars for 20 days and sending back a lot of data. Due to the distance between Earth and the “red planet”, there is a delay of hours or days for information to reach us. To make things more interesting, in celebration of the orbiter’s birthday, ESA has announced that it will be live streaming images captured by the Mars Express.
Watch live broadcast with Mars Express footage
From 1pm (Brasília time)the European Space Agency will perform a live (live transmission) in its official YouTube channel called “European Space Agency, ESA”. There you will be able to see images transmitted directly from the spacecraft’s Visual Monitoring Camera, the Mars Webcam. Furthermore, it is known that a new image will be displayed approximately every 50 seconds for one hour (duration time of the event).
Sobre a Mars Webcam do Mars Express
The focus of the development of the Mars Webcam was to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the Mars Express spacecraft. After transmitting the initial packet of data, the Mars Webcam shut down. However, four years later, the webcam was turned on once more to carry out outreach activities. Subsequently, the ESA team decided to take advantage of the camera to carry out scientific studies.
One of those responsible for operating the “Visual Monitoring Camera” (VMC or Visual Monitoring Camera), Jorge Hernández Bernal, said in the ESA statement:
We developed new and more sophisticated methods of operation and image processing to get better results from the camera, making it the 8th scientific instrument for Mars Express
The images captured by the Mars Webcam are stored in batches and sent every other day to the mission control team. After receiving the data, the files are processed and made available for viewing. This procedure is quite common for the vast majority of spacecraft, as data collection tends to happen when they are not in direct contact with the earth station antenna on Earth.
What is the delay between capturing images and sending them when watching ESA live today?
According to information from the ESA, during the live streaming on YouTube, the images displayed from the Mars Express will have a delay of only 18 minutes between capturing the landscape of Mars and what will appear on our screens. That’s how long it takes the signal to travel from Mars to Earth, plus an extra minute for data to pass through wires and servers here.
The European Space Agency says that a live like this has never been done before and so the delay estimate might be a little off. The spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany says:
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 are not 100% sure that it will work. But I’m quite optimistic.
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