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The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), also known as the Video Monitoring Camera and Mars Webcam, is a small camera mounted on Mars Express spacecraft. It is operated by the Mars Express Flight Control Team at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany.
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History
The camera was included on the Mars Express mission with the singular goal of monitoring the deployment of the Beagle 2 lander, which occurred on 19 December 2003 at 08:31 UTC. After performing this task, the VMC remained unused, having no intended scientific purpose. In 2007 it was checked out and turned on for educational and science outreach. The Mars Webcam project was born and proved popular with the public, offering wide-angle shots of Mars on a regular basis.
The VMC was adopted as a science instrument in early 2016 in a collaboration between ESA and the University of the Basque Country's Planetary Sciences Group. This collaboration will conduct a two-year study of the images returned by VMC, which provide a global view of the planet and allow for the study of planetary phenomena, including changes in the ice caps, dust storms and cloud activity.
The European Space Agency occasionally establishes campaigns inviting people to propose targets to be imaged by the cameras, such as the event on 25-27 May 2015.
As of May 2016, the camera has returned over 19,000 images. New images are published to the camera's Flickr account in a fully automated process as they are received from the spacecraft, and all images produced by the VMC are released under a Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO).
Technical specifications
Specifications of the VMC are: