From the Mars Express Mars Webcam blog: Today’s post sent in by Mars Express Spacecraft Operations Engineer Simon Wood, at ESOC. The news? Ten observations slots in the next four weeks, starting today!
You may have noticed that VMC has been very quiet over the last few months. This was due to Mars Express experiencing one of its regular ‘eclipse seasons’. As our orbit precesses around Mars, there are periods during the year during which, for part of the orbit, Mars is between the spacecraft and the Sun. These eclipses can last for up to 40 minutes per orbit with the result that, during this part of the orbit, no power is generated by the solar arrays. This means that your spacecraft is running on battery power only… [More at link, and at the Mars Webcam data archive and Flickr page]