Written in SCIENCE he
The European Space Agency (THAT) will carry out a live transmission of Marsthanks to the space probe Mars Express and the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) that was installed on the spacecraft to celebrate the orbiter’s 20th anniversary.
The images “live” will be sent every 50 seconds and according to what is specified by the ESA this will be a milestone, since all the images and even observations made from the land of the red planet are evidence of the past.
“Once light bounces off it or is sent by orbiters and landers that explore it and travels to the Land. Depending on the relative positions of the two planets, this (sending information) can take from 3 to 22 minutes,” explained the international organization, noting that due to this fact, there are no real-time images of the planet.
The event can be followed through the Youtube channel of the Space agency; the organization specified that the time between the images taken from the orbit around Mars and the screen appearance will be approximately 18 minutes.
“It takes 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in its current configuration, and about a minute to pass through the cables and servers on the ground,” he explained.
In addition to this, he indicated that most of the observations and data collected by the spaceships they are taken during periods when they are not in direct contact with a ground station antenna on Earth, so the information collected is stored on board the units and transmitted hours or days later.
“What typically happens with the visual monitoring camera on Mars Express is that every two days a new batch is ‘unloaded’, processed and made available to the world,” he noted.
That is why the Mars Express mission is so important, since there are live image records from other missions such as the DART and NASA’s LCROSS or even Apollo when he captured a video of moonwalk; however, this will be the first time the transmission has been sent from deep space.
“Note that we have never attempted anything like this before, so the exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a bit uncertain,” ESA said in a statement.