mars express

ESA’s Mars Express has provided new insights into Mars’s Medusae Fossae Formation, revealing deep layers of water ice, the largest such discovery in the region. This ice could significantly impact our understanding of Mars’s climate history and is crucial for future human exploration. Credit: Planetary Science Institute/Smithsonian InstitutionRecent Mars Express data reveals the Medusae Fossae Formation contains extensive water ice layers, offering new clues about Mars’s past and supporting future exploration.Windswept…

The solar conjunction of Mars occurs approximately every 25 months, disrupting communication with Mars missions. In 2023, Mars will pass directly behind the Sun, causing a complete communication blackout for about one and a half days. This event highlights the challenges in interplanetary communication and the need for advanced planning and technology.The space between Earth and Mars is usually buzzing with science data, telemetry, and commands racing to and from almost a dozen missions at the Red Planet. But for roughly…

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Mars Express Orbiter, the European Space Agency broadcast the first-ever Mars livestream, in a historic event that unfolded over an hour on Friday, June 3. A newly released animation shows a sped-up version of how the livestream unfolded.Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewDuring the live stream, images arrived once every 50 seconds, as the orbiter’s onboardVisual Monitoring Camera (VMC) captured the photos from Mars orbit. There is,…

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a new mosaic of the…

For the past 20 years, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express has been orbiting the Red Planet and sending back precious data that reveal the Martian landscape. Our views of Mars, however, have always suffered from a slight technical delay, taking hours or sometimes days to transmit their way back to Earth. That’sset to change with the first Martian livestream beamed directly from the red planet.Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewOn Friday, ESA will stream a live feed of…

An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft which launched in 2003.Illustration: ESAThe days of dial-up internet, AOL InstantMessenger, and Myspace may be over on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the internet still live on. A Martian spacecraft has been running on software designed more than 20 years ago in a proprietary environment based on Microsoft Windows 98, and is long overdue for an upgrade.The European Space Agency (ESA) is updating its Mars Express orbiter’s MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface…

In late April, the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission captured an image of Aonia Terra, a crater-filled region in the Red Planet's southern hemisphere. So, what's special about these photographs? Well, one of the images shows a crater encircled by winding channels. A closer look would suggest that the image looks eerily like a human eyeball. However, the objective of the massive eye-gazing image of the crater, which measures 30 kilometres across, is not to give readers cosmic goosebumps. It's to assist them in…