People go live all the time. Concerts, sports, and news reports blast out in real time. They hit computer, phone, and TV screens. On June 2, there was a new star. The planet Mars went (nearly) live!
The European Space Agency (ESA) did this. It used the Mars Express spacecraft. That craft has now been in space for 20 years! It celebrated by giving Mars its first livestream.
For Mars, going live isn’t easy. The Red Planet is so far from Earth that we can’t actually see it perfectly live. It takes time for images to travel the huge distance between Mars and Earth. The craft also has to be in a certain position to send images. So it often sends the info days later.
For the livestream, a Mars Express camera sent images straight to screens of viewers. The camera posted pictures every 50 seconds. The images traveled about 200 million miles (321 million km) to Earth. That took nearly 17 minutes. Then, it took another minute or so for the images to move through wires. This was the closest to a Mars livestream that’s ever been seen!
The stream lasted an hour. The photos showed Mars half in darkness. No one is on the spacecraft. But “if you were sitting on Mars Express, this is what you would be seeing,” said Simon Wood. He’s an ESA expert.
James Godfrey is a leader at ESA’s mission control. That’s in Germany. “Normally, we see images from Mars that were taken days before,” Godfrey said. “I’m excited to see Mars as it is now.” It’s “as close to a Martian ‘now’ as we can get!” he added.
Updated June 5, 2023, 5:01 P.M. (ET)
By Ashley Morgan
