The 47th ESLAB Symposium — Broadcasting live from ESA

The Planck satellite was launched on 14 May 2009 and has surveyed the sky continuously since August 2009. The nominal duration of the mission was completed in November 2010, but Planck continued to gather data. The challenge: how do you reach a global audience of scientists to share the results from the Planck mission?

By broadcasting your study results live and online. Hired by Minoto Video, we were brought in to scale an SD signal to HD 720 and broadcast it — to other Space centres across Europe and to the public internet simultaneously, feeding the live presentation into the broadcast.

There were additional rooms at ESA with projections that required their own feeds. We managed the signal routing across the facility throughout the event, delivering over 50 hours of recordings during four intense working days.

This was a technically demanding production — scientific content, multiple simultaneous feeds going to different locations, and a global audience watching the results of a mission that had been running for years. No room for error.