Mars

Watch European Space Agency's First Live Stream From Mars

The agency said "this will be the closest you can get to a live view from the Red Planet"

A view of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars, composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images on July 9, 2013.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

We're live from Mars!

The European Space Agency launched a live stream of images from the planet Mars on Friday afternoon, with the agency saying "this will be the closest you can get to a live view from the Red Planet."

The one-hour stream, which was in celebration of the 20th birthday of Mars Express spacecraft that has orbited the planet nearly 25,000 times, showed new images of Mars roughly every 50 seconds. The images were "beamed down directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s long-lived but still-highly-productive martian orbiter," the agency said.

Technically, the stream wasn't "live." But it was close. The agency said light traveling from Mars to Earth can take anywhere from three to 22 minutes depending on the orbital position of the two planets.

"In this way, there’s actually no such thing as ‘live’ news in space as we are limited by the speed of light traversing great distances," the agency said.

Watch a replay of the live stream on the agency's YouTube channel.

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