If you missed the #MarsLIVE, find the full video on Youtube along with the beautiful mosaic from the HRSC camera, specially released for the 20th anniversary of Mars Express. The software, created by Jorge, had been prepared for just this scenario, which meant it could recover after just one creative outburst and continue to provide us with impressive images again, as soon as the communication disruption was over. The colours look different in different areas because they are shifted from their real positions, so the reconstructed colour from the bayer filter contains colour 'artifacts'."
"At least 20 images are mixed into this scrambled Mars collage. "Our software was confused and the best it could do was to express its creativity and provide this interesting collage, in which different horizontal fringes correspond to different 'lost' images, shifted from their original position," explains Jorge Hernández Bernal, part of the VMC team and key, along with spacecraft engineer Simon Wood, to making the livestream possible. Once the full connection was reestablished, the software – specially made for this event – put all the partial fragments of Mars images into one jumbled picture, assuming they were all part of one strange whole. The first data packet provides information on the image itself, and if that is lost then different bits of data from different images could be read by the software as being part of the same picture.ĭuring the ‘missing Mars’ period, only some packets of data were received, corresponding to different parts of different images.
Each VMC image consists of 76 'data packets', each one containing around six-and-a-half horizontal lines. The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board Mars Express was beaming down images of the Red Planet roughly every 50 seconds.
Between 18:23-18:41 CEST, the antenna was not receiving MEX's transmission properly. When the connection returned, so did this strange image of a scrambled Mars. Unfortunately*, for part of the transmission, ESA's ground station in Cebreros, Spain, lost connection with the spacecraft due to bad weather at the antenna. For an hour, it became possible to see the Red Planet in as close to real-time as the speed of light would allow. To celebrate the 20th birthday of ESA’s Mars Express on 2 June, and after months of work from engineers and scientists to make it possible, ESA aired the first-ever Mars livestream.
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