Watch Mars Live: For the first time, you can see Mars as it is right now, says ESA

Mars has been making its live-streaming debut, and the show would reveal the red planet in a whole new light. According to CNN, the European Space Agency is set to stream on YouTube an hour of the first live images directly from Mars on Friday. The news has been shared by the agency on June 2. Further, the event has been set to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express. Mass  Express is a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in complete detail.

Taking to Twitter, ESA operations wrote, " A new image will appear every ~50 seconds, each taking about 16 mins to reach Earth from Mars. Two experts, Simon Wood  @marwood82 and Jorge Hernandez-Bernal  @jorgeherber  will be on hand for the hour to answer questions in the chat. See you there! #MarsLIVE" 

Witness the Red Planet in all its glory

According to the ESA, one can watch the stream on ESA’s YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. (CET). Further, the agency shared that the images would not be truly live and there will be new images about every 50 seconds of that hour, said the agency.

The updates related to this event will also be available on ESA’s Twitter account with the hashtag #MarsLIVE. While talking about the event that will be starting on (European) evening time, the spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, James Godfrey said, “Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before.”

Further, he added, “I’m excited to see Mars as it is now — as close to a Martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!” To begin the live stream, the ESA estimates it would take about 17 minutes for the light needed to form the images to travel directly from Mars to Earth and then another minute to get through the wires and servers on the ground, according to ESA. “Note, we’ve never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain,” the agency said in a statement.