To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the European Space Agency's Mars Express, researchers developed a way for the probe to capture 'live' footage of the Red Planet. It took each image 16 minutes to travel the 140 million miles to Earth, and the ESA streamed each of these 'live' shots on YouTube as they were received. In the past images of Mars were seen several days or even weeks after they had been taken from orbiters and landers on the planet. The Mars Express team used the Visual Monitoring Camera, which is an older camera and not meant for how it was to be used for the livestream. "I'm excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a Martian 'now' as we can possibly get," said James Godfrey, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA's Mission Control Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.