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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Liam Buckler

Incredible footage of Mars streamed live - see pics of the Red Planet

Incredible footage of Mars has been streamed live for the first time on YouTube - with stunning pictures of the Red Planet.

For the first time in history, images of the Red Planet have beamed across our screens thanks to the European Space Agency, which is live-streaming the surface of Mars.

The images are being sent down to a receiver every 50 seconds after experts spent weeks ensuring the camera could stream for an entire 60 minutes.

The "live stream" will not be seen as it happens because there is a slight delay of around 18 minutes.

This is due to Mars being 140million miles away from Earth.

ESA explained: "That’s 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth in their current configuration, and about one minute to pass through the wires and servers on the ground."

The Visual Monitoring Camera, which is on board the Mars Express, is currently rolling over the Red Planet.

The transmissions from Mars were interrupted as a ground station near Madrid experienced bad weather, according to the ESA scientists.

The previous pictures from the planet were only ever captured by orbiters and landers.

ESA Spacecraft Operations Manager James Godfrey said: "This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometres from Earth.

"This hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100 per cent certain it’ll work.

"But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before.

"I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a martian “now” as we can possibly get!"

The Mars Express, which launched in 2003, is the ESA's first attempt to visit a planet in the solar system.

It has also used the same technology in the Mars 96 and ESA Rosetta missions.

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