On June 3rd, the European Space Agency (ESA) conducted one of the most “unbelievable” livestreams from Mars to Earth.
During this event, images captured live from the Mars Express orbiter, which is currently operating in the Martian atmosphere, were broadcast on ESA’s official YouTube channel.
“This is the first time there has been a livestream from deep space,” ESA stated in a press release. Previously, most observations and data collected by spacecraft were sent back to Earth after several hours or even days.
Some exceptional cases could be considered livestreams, such as footage from the Apollo missions showing astronauts walking on the Moon’s surface or NASA’s DART mission that involved crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid.
Unlike popular forms of livestreaming enabled by the Internet on Earth, scientists had to use a set of tools including transmitters and receivers to send images from Mars.
The transmitters on the spacecraft encode the information into radio waves, which are then transmitted through space to the receiving antennas located on Earth. The data is then processed and converted back into images.
Depending on the positions of Mars and Earth in their orbits around the sun, the transmission time for data in space can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes.
The live broadcast image from Mars Express (left) was surprising as Mars did not appear red as expected. (Photo: ESA).
In this livestream, ESA estimated that it took approximately 17 minutes for the data to reach Earth, and about 1 minute to reach the server. However, due to the data delay in space, the images were not continuously broadcast live on YouTube; instead, they were transmitted every 50 seconds.
Another detail is that the images of Mars did not show the expected red color. Many viewers found this detail quite strange as the fourth planet in the Solar System appeared in the livestream with only a grayish-white hue.
Explaining this, Jorge Hernandez Bernal, the researcher in charge of the Mars Express mission, stated that observing Mars through camera images and direct observation are two entirely different things.
As such, color seems to be a very complex issue related to how our eyes, as well as the cameras on the spacecraft, work to filter out unwanted distortions in space.
Therefore, it can be understood that Mars still appears red when observed with the naked eye. However, after undergoing some image processing from the camera, that red will disappear. This is similar to how we see the sky as blue, while space is actually black.
