For the first time, live images of the planet Mars have been released on YouTube by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The event is part of the celebration of the 20e anniversary of the launch of the Agency’s Mars Express orbiter.
Its mission: to collect as many details and three-dimensional images as possible of the surface of the planet Mars in order to make a complete portrait of it.
The ESA has estimated the delay in transmitting images from Mars to Earth at 17 minutes, then another minute to travel through the cables and to the servers.
Depending on the position of the two planets, the information can take between 3 and 22 minutes to reach its destination, reports CNN.
“Note that we have never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for ground signals remain somewhat uncertain,” the Agency said in a statement ahead of the broadcast.
Colin Wilson, a project scientist, explains that no stars were visible at the time because Mars is so bright.