European Space Agency hosts first Mars live stream

 Get ready to see Mars in real time.

The European Space Agency is set to stream on YouTube the first live images directly from Mars, according to statement from the agency. The stream will start at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET, and reveal a new image about every 50 seconds.

Updates will also be available at ESA’s Twitter account and the hashtag #MarsLIVE, the agency said.

The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express orbiter — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.

“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. “I’m excited to see Mars as it is now — as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”

But haven’t we seen images of Mars before? Yes, but not live, the ESA said.

Often data and observations of the red planet are taken when a spacecraft is not in direct contact with Earth, so the images are stored until they can be sent back, ESA said.

Depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits around the sun, the messages that journey through space can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes.

To begin the live stream, ESA estimates it will take about 17 minutes for the light needed to form the images to travel directly from Mars to Earth and then another minute to get through the wires and servers on the ground, the agency said.

“Note, we’ve never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain,” the agency said in a statement.