Orographic clouds are also common during this season, and form as the atmosphere flows up mountains and volcanic slopes.” “The South Polar cap is apparent in these images, close to the polar night, while the Arsia Mons volcano is present on the left side of the planet. "Mars is now approaching the southern winter season," explains Jorge Hernández Bernal, part of the VMC team. However, there are many fascinating martian features that reveal themselves.
Usually, image processing removes such noise and stains but it’s not always possible. This is not actually on the planet but a ‘stain’ in part of the sensor that increases the amount of light that reaches pixels in this area. Just before the connection is lost and there’s a break in images, a small white feature flashes up on Mars’ edge. Note the gap in the middle – unfortunately*, rain at ESA's ground station in Cebreros, Spain, meant we lost 'telemetry' (data) from Mars Express for a period during the live. This gif is made up of all the images that came down during that hour, roughly 50 seconds apart from each other, beamed directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s long-lived but-still-highly-productive martian orbiter. 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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