On Friday, to celebrate the 20th birthday of ESA’s Mars Express, you’ll have the chance to get as close as it’s currently possible get to Mars.
Tune in on Friday from 17:45 CEST to be the first to see new pictures from Mars, beamed down every ~50 seconds from the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s long-lived but-still-highly-productive martian orbiter.
As images stream from our #MarsExpress birthday spacecraft, they’ll be captured by our 35-m deep space antenna in Cebreros, Spain.
“This is a 20-year-old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometres – this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100% certain it’ll work”, James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s Mission Control.