A historic, first-of-its-kind live transmission from a European spacecraft from the Red Planet was continuously interrupted by rain – from Earth.
The European Space Agency live-streamed stunning views of Earth’s neighbor Mars Express to have fun the spacecraft’s twentieth anniversary. It was launched by a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan in 2003.
Each image from Mars, some 200 million miles away, took about 17 minutes to transmit, and one other minute to go through the ground stations here that handled Earth elements.
Rainy weather disrupted the space relay antenna in Spain all the time transmissionnevertheless, many awe-inspiring paintings still survive.
The initial images uploaded showed a few third of Mars steadily expanding into the frame as the spacecraft orbited the planet.
White clouds dot the planet’s atmosphere in some shots.
“For those who were sitting aboard the Mars Express… that is what you’ll see,” said Simon Wood, the mission’s spacecraft operations engineer. “We do not normally get images that way.”
Wood said Mars Express normally takes pictures and saves them before sending them back to ESA scientists when the spacecraft’s antenna is pointed toward Earth.
Near-real-time transmission of images from space is “reasonably rare” in line with ESA, which noted the landmark 1969 broadcast of the first moon landing.
“All of those missions were quite near home, and others further away, sending perhaps a picture or two in near real time,” ESA said in a press release ahead of the broadcast.
“When it comes to a protracted live broadcast from space, that is the first,” the agency said.
Spanish rain cut through a lot of the pictures shown. ESA only devoted an hour to the live broadcast because they didn’t need to overload the spacecraft’s battery.
The Mars Express traveled to the red planet on a lander called Beagle-2, but the landing craft lost contact with Earth because it attempted to land on the Martian surface.
Greater than a decade later, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of Beagle-2. Even though it reached the surface, the lander’s solar panels weren’t fully deployed.
NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered the undulating rock textures earlier this yr, giving scientists the best evidence yet suggesting lakes existed in the region of ancient Mars.
With postal wires