See images from the first Mars live stream

The event celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express orbiter — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.

“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement.

Often data and observations of the red planet are taken when a spacecraft is not in direct contact with Earth, so the images are stored until they can be sent back, ESA said.

“Note, we’ve never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain,” the agency said in a statement prior to the event.

No stars were visible in the background of the images because Mars is quite bright, noted Colin Wilson, a project scientist at ESA.

However, for some time, the transmissions from Mars were interrupted, the ESA scientists noted, as a ground station near Madrid experienced bad weather.