The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), also known as the Video Monitoring Camera and Mars Webcam, is a small camera mounted on ''

Mars Express ''Mars Express'' is a space exploration mission by the European Space Agency, European Space Agency (ESA) exploring the planet Mars and its moons since 2003, and the first planetary mission attempted by ESA. ''Mars Express'' consisted of two ...

'' spacecraft. It is operated by the Mars Express Flight Control Team at

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, Germany. Originally, VMC was a technical camera to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander, but after a few years, it was repurposed into Mars Webcam, streaming its data to the web and even being used for science. Starting in 2007, the VMC was used for the Mars Webcam project, where it takes global views of Mars at a high cadence and they are posted online. The VMC is a camera-on-chip design, using the IRIS-1 system. Originally used as engineering monitoring camera for the ''

Beagle 2 The ''Beagle 2'' was an inoperative British Mars lander that was transported by the European Space Agency's 2003 ''Mars Express'' mission. It was intended to conduct an astrobiology mission that would have looked for evidence of past life on M ...

'' lander, it has a wide 40°

field of view The field of view (FOV) is the angle, angular extent of the observable world that is visual perception, seen at any given moment. In the case of optical instruments or sensors, it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to elec ...

and limited imaging controls and it has no focus mechanism. In 2016, it was used for professional science in addition to its roles as a technical monitoring camera and public outreach.

History

The camera was included on the ''Mars Express'' mission with the singular goal of monitoring the deployment of the ''

'' lander, which occurred on 19 December 2003 at 08:31

UTC Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time. It establishes a reference for the current time, forming the basis for civil time and time zones. UTC facilitates international communica ...

. After performing this task, the VMC remained unused, having no intended scientific purpose. In 2007, it was checked out and turned on for educational and science outreach. The Mars Webcam project was born and proved popular with the public, offering wide-angle shots of Mars on a regular basis. The VMC was adopted as a science instrument in early 2016, in a collaboration between ESA and the

University of the Basque Country The University of the Basque Country (, ''EHU''; , ''UPV''; officially EHU) is a Spanish public university of the Basque Country (autonomous community), Basque Autonomous Community. Heir of the University of Deusto, University of Bilbao, initial ...

Planetary Sciences Group. This collaboration will conduct a two-year study of the images returned by VMC, which provide a global view of the planet and allow for the study of planetary phenomena, including changes in the ice caps, dust storms and cloud activity. The European Space Agency occasionally establishes campaigns inviting people to propose targets to be imaged by the cameras, such as the event on 25–27 May 2015. , more than 21,000 images had been returned. New images are published to the camera's Flickr account in a fully automated process as they are received from the spacecraft, sometimes in as little as 75 minutes from when the photograph was taken at Mars. All images produced by the VMC are released under a

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Attribution/ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO). On June 3, 2023, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of ''Mars Express'', a

livestream Livestreaming, live-streaming, or live streaming is the streaming media, streaming of video or Digital audio, audio in real-time communication, real time or near real time. While often referred to simply as ''streaming'', the real-time nature ...

of images from the camera was streamed online, which was the first livestream direct from Mars.

Technical specifications

Specifications of the VMC are: *

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss ", , ) is a type of MOSFET, metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) semiconductor device fabrication, fabrication process that uses complementary an ...

based (IMEC IRIS-1) * B/W +

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green, and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three ...

filters * Image size: 640×480 pixels * Pixel depth: 8 bits *

Field of view The field of view (FOV) is the angle, angular extent of the observable world that is visual perception, seen at any given moment. In the case of optical instruments or sensors, it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to elec ...

: 40×31 degrees * Approximate distance from Mars surface: * Calculatedtan(31°/2) * 300 km / 240 px resolution at 300 km: * Calculatedtan(31°/2) * 10000 km / 240 px resolution at 10,000 km: * Mass: * Size:

Observation targets

Noted observations: *Beagle 2 *Mars **2018 Martian dust storm

Notes

References

External links