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The European Space Agency broadcasted historic live photos from Mars on YouTube.
The photographs, which were published on YouTube, ESA's Twitter account, and with the hashtag #MarsLIVE, revealed the planet in a way never seen before, according to ESA.
The ceremony commemorated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency's Mars Express orbiter, which was designed to acquire three-dimensional photos of the planet's surface in order to better understand it.
"Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before," said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at the European Space Agency's mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. "I'm very excited to see Mars as it is now — as close to a martian 'now' as we can possibly get!"
But haven't we already seen photographs of Mars? Yes, but not live, according to the ESA.
Data and observations of Mars are frequently collected when a spacecraft is not in direct communication with Earth, so the photographs are kept until they can be relayed back, according to ESA.
Messages can take anything from 3 to 22 minutes to travel through space, depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits around the sun.
The ESA projected that it would take roughly 17 minutes for the light needed to generate the pictures to travel directly from Mars to Earth, followed by another minute to go via the wires and servers on the ground to start the livestream.
"Note, we've never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain," the agency stated in a statement before of the event.
Because Mars is so bright, no stars were visible in the photographs' backgrounds, according to Colin Wilson, an ESA project scientist.
"If you're very close to it, it's even brighter," Wilson observed, and this obscures the surrounding stars from the angle from which the spacecraft is taking photographs.
However, if you were on the Mars Express mission, you would be able to observe a large portion of the universe, Wilson remarked. "And that, in fact, is critical to how Mars Express navigates," he explained. The spacecraft utilises an onboard map and images of the stars to orient itself in space, just like people have done for centuries.
According to the agency's announcement ahead to the event, new images of Mars were expected every 50 seconds for an hour. However, the ESA scientists highlighted that signals from Mars were halted for a period due to severe weather at a ground station near Madrid.
Some observers may have also remarked that the red planet was not as crimson as predicted. During the live transmission, Jorge Hernández Bernal, a member of the Mars Express's visual monitoring camera crew, observed that Mars seemed as though taken with an iPhone, rather than as viewed with the human eye.
"Colour is a very complex topic that is related to the way our eyes work," he explained. The photographs from the spacecraft are also processed to reduce "noise" — or undesired interruptions in the imaging — which might affect their appearance.
Mars Express sent around an hour's worth of photographs before moving too far away from the planet to continue collecting it. Additional information will be given on Twitter, according to the scientists.