The images will be captured by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) affixed to the Mars Express.
The camera will bring you live pictures of Mars every 50 seconds. The pictures won’t exactly be live per se due to the time lag that it takes for the images to reach Earth. It takes approximately a time duration of three to 22 minutes.
To behold glimpses of the Red Planet, one can track the agency’s official Twitter account handle as it will be sending out all the updates. The first time when Mars Express began orbiting Mars was on 25 December 2003, on Christmas day.
20th birthday of ESA’s Mars Express
ESA by telcasting the live streaming of Mars is infact celebrating Mars Express’ 20th anniversary. This is your chance to get as close as it’s possible for you to get to a live view from Mars.
“Tune in to be amongst the first to see new pictures roughly every 50 seconds as they’re beamed down directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera on board ESA’s long-lived and still highly productive martian orbiter,” ESA said in a stament.
James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany said, “This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometres from Earth – this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100% certain it’ll work.”
“But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”
Exploration of Mars
NASA rovers in its Mars exploration missions have found signs of water and other habitable conditions on the Red Planet. From ancient hot springs to signs of volcano eruptions to fascinating craters, there have been many significant discoveries about the Red Planet.
