Mars is making its live debut, and the show will reveal the red planet in a whole new light. This Friday, the European Space Agency to stream on YouTube one hour of the first live images directly from Mars, according to a statement from the agency.
The event commemorates the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in greater detail.
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You can watch the video on the ESA YouTube channel for one hour starting at 13:00 GMT. While not actually live, there will be a new image every 50 seconds for that hour, the agency said.
Updates will also be available on the twitter from the ESA and the hashtag #MarsLIVE, the agency said.
“Usually we see images of Mars and we know they were taken days before,” James Godfrey, manager of spacecraft operations at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, said in a statement. “I am excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a Martian ‘now’ as possible!”
But haven’t we seen images of Mars before? Yes, but not live, the ESA said.
Often, data and observations of the Red Planet are taken when a spacecraft is not in direct contact with Earth, so the images are stored until they can be sent back, the ESA said.
Depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits around the sun, messages traveling through space can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes.
To start the live stream, the ESA estimates it will take about 17 minutes for the light needed to form the images to travel directly from Mars to Earth, and then another minute to pass through wires and servers on the ground, the ESA said.
“Please note, we have never attempted anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain somewhat unclear,” the agency said in a statement.
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