ESA spacecraft beams first-ever live video from Mars despite technical difficulties.

The European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated the 20th launch anniversary of its first Mars probe by holding the first-ever "livestream from Mars," beaming home photos from its Mars Express orbiter in real time. The Mars Express team had worked for several months to develop the tools to make today's livestream possible. The photos showed a slightly blurry slice of Mars taken by the probe's Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC). Mars Express has achieved a great deal with its instruments during its nearly two decades at the Red Planet, including sniffing out methane in the thin Martian atmosphere, detecting a possible salty lake beneath Mars' south pole, and mapping the composition of ice at both of the planet's poles.