Today’s update from Spacecraft Operations Engineer Simon Wood on the MEX team at ESOC on progress of the VMC Schools Campaign.

Sorting the ~2000 VMC Schools Campaign images is going well. We’ve got an initial collation of the images for each school / group done now. The sets are being double checked for accuracy.

Mars limb seen in VMC image 15-147_09.53.42_VMC_Img_No_8, acquired 27 May. Credit: ESA/Mars/Express/VMC - ESA - CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

Mars limb seen in VMC image 15-147_09.53.42_VMC_Img_No_8, acquired 27 May. Credit: ESA/Mars/Express/VMC – ESA – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

There’s a bit of disappointing news: there are a couple of requested imaging targets that didn’t work out very well, either because of the dust or the lighting conditions, or because the image just simply doesn’t show the target too well. For these, we will dig through the VMC archive and provide some better quality VMC images from past observations that do show the requested target adequately.

Editor’s note: We expect to start mailing images within a couple working days. 🙂