1st-ever Mars livestream! Watch the replay here

The 1st-ever Mars livestream began at noon ET (16 UTC, 18 CEST) on Friday, June 2, 2023, and lasted for one hour. Watch it here.

Wow! A Mars livestream?!

What next? On June 2, 2023, the European Space Agency (ESA) broadcast a livestream – the first ever – from the red planet Mars. The livestream lasted approximately one hour, as live images streamed down directly from Mars roughly every 50 seconds. Watch in the viewer above.

The images came from the Visual Monitoring Camera on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, had said prior to the event:

This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometers [2 million miles] from Earth. This hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100% certain it’ll work …

But it did work! Cool …

Mars Express 20th birthday

The livestream was in celebration of the 20th birthday of ESA’s Mars Express, which ESA called:

… [A] long-lived and still highly productive Martian orbiter.

Go Mars Express!

Bottom line: The European Space Agency broadcast the 1st-ever Mars livestream on June 2, 2023. Watch it here.