Following its arrival at the Red Planet in December 2003, imagery from ESA’s Mars Express mission has proved immensely popular, with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the spacecraft playing a major role.

Since January 2004, ESA and its partners at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) have been jointly publishing colour, stereo pictures of the martian surface from orbit, both still and moving. For example, a “Mars showcase” video, comprised of HRSC images, has been viewed almost 700,000 times since it was published on ESA’s Youtube channel in 2013.

But starting today, something is different with these regular image releases: in a joint undertaking by all three partners, Mars Express HRSC images will be made available under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. The licence we will apply is the same one we recently introduced for Rosetta NAVCAM images: CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, with credit to ESA/DLR/FU Berlin. In practical terms it will look like this:

Hellas Chaos

Hellas Chaos on Mars. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

And as luck would have it, we have a Mars Express HRSC movie release today which becomes the first to be covered by this Creative Commons licence:

Please read the full article on the ESA web portal here.

The licence will also be applied retroactively to all HRSC images released to date. As with Rosetta NAVCAM images, please bear with us as it will take a while to go back and change the credit lines for all of those images in our online galleries. But as a start, we have applied the new licencing to all HRSC images in our Mars Express Flickr album.

While at ESA we have only just begun releasing content under Creative Commons licences,  our partners at DLR have been using CC as their standard licencing policy since 2012. Nevertheless, there is still something just a little bit special about the news today: as far as we know, it is the first time that three public organisations in Europe have teamed up in licencing a batch of joint content under Creative Commons.

For more in-depth info on ESA’s implementation of the CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO licence, please also read this blog post that I wrote with my colleague Mark McCaughrean.

Marco Trovatello is the Strategy Advisor and Cross-Media Coordinator for ESA’s Communication Department. Follow him on Twitter at @marco_t.