This means it won't be truly live, but a new image will appear every 50 seconds for the duration of the hour.
The ESA's Visual Monitoring Camera onboard the orbiter will return "first to see new pictures roughly every 50 seconds" from the planet.We frequently see science data and observations taken by a spacecraft or rover when they are not in direct contact with an Earth-based ground station antenna.
Typically, images are stored on board and sent hours, days, or even weeks later, once the spacecraft regains contact with the ground. “What normally happens for the Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express, is every couple of days a new batch are ‘downlinked’, processed and made available to the world,” the ESA added.
Technically, it takes about three to 22 minutes for images to beam back depending on the position of Mars and Earth in orbit around the Sun. And all of those images are processed and enhanced in appearance. As a result, seeing direct images is rather rare. Surprisingly, only a few missions in history have used live streaming, mainly DART and LCROSS, which deliberately collided with asteroid Dimorphos and the Moon, respectively. Even some Apollo missions returned spectacular live videos of astronauts hopping on the lunar surface.
“We developed new, more sophisticated methods of operations and image processing, to get better results from the camera, turning it into Mars Express’s 8th science instrument,” said Jorge Hernández Bernal, part of the VMC team.
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