Live from the red planet: Mars Express transmits first live stream from Earth’s neighbour

“Ooh, here it is, this is the first image from Mars and it is the most live you will ever get unless you travel to the red planet. This is Mars 16 minutes ago,” said a commentator on ESA’s live stream as the first images popped up on the screen shortly after the livestream began at 9.15 PM IST on June 2.

Most of the observations taken by Mars Express are gathered during times when it does not have direct contact with Earth. There are typically two reasons for this to happen—either the spacecraft is on the other side of the Sun or Mars or its antennas are pointed in a direction away from our planet when it’s taking observations. You can see the recorded version of the live stream below.

Usually, the Visual Monitoring Camera on the Mars Express takes images of the planet and beams it down to Earth once every couple of days where it is processed by ESA and made publicly available.

This system is perfectly fine for science missions as astronomers can later pore over the data days after it has been captured. But beaming live images back to the planet is a daunting and technically impressive task.

This is why there have only been a few historical examples of receiving live images from deep space. The spectacular live videos sent by the Apollo missions are great examples. And more recently, the DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos is also a great example.