When a mission to Mars reaches 20 years of service, that’s definitely reason to celebrate. ESA’s Mars Express celebrated by airing the first-ever livestream of images, sent directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board the spacecraft. For an hour, it sent back images from the Red Planet in as close to real-time as the speed of light would allow.
The animated gif, above, was created from all the images that came down during that hour, roughly 50 seconds apart from each other. There’s a short break in the middle of the animation because of an unexpected rainstorm at ESA’s ground station in Cebreros, Spain, where telemetry wasn’t able to be received.
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