Appointment for Friday 2 June at 18 for the premiere live from Mars: it will be broadcast for an hour on the YouTube profile of the European Space Agency, thanks to the images taken from the orbit of the Red Planet by the Mars Express probe, which thus celebrates 20 years of his mission. This world premiere from deep space will be as close as possible to a live stream, compatibly with the technical times necessary for the transmission of data from Mars: it will allow you to see images of the planet updated every 50 seconds, which from the moment of they will take about 18 minutes to get to Earth and appear on our computer screens.
To date, the cases of live broadcasts from space can be counted on the fingers of one hand, such as the historical one of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon and the most recent one transmitted during the collision of the Dart probe with the asteroid Dimorphos. Other more distant missions, such as Cassini’s to Saturn, have offered only one or two near real-time images, certainly not an hour-long live broadcast.
This feat “has never been attempted before and, to be honest, we’re not 100% sure it will work, however I’m quite optimistic,” says James Godfrey, operations manager at ESA’s control center in Darmstadt. in Germany. “Normally we see images of Mars that were taken several days ago. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now, getting as close to a Martian ‘now’ as possible!”
The images will be taken by the Visual Monitoring Camera (also known as Mars Webcam) mounted on board the Mars Express spacecraft: initially designed to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the mission orbiter, it was then turned on again in 2007 for dissemination activities aimed at students and space enthusiasts and, subsequently, to conduct real scientific observations, such as those that made it possible to study the evolution of a rare elongated cloud formation hovering above one of the most famous volcanoes on Mars, the Arsia Mons, 20 kilometers high.
Source: Ansa
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