"Mars Express has been designed to perform a thorough exploration of the Red Planet, not only searching for water but daring to search for life itself," said Fulvio Drigani, ESA's portal manager.

"The Web site is key to bringing this ambitious project home to the viewers on Earth. Since we expect record traffic to our site, after a rigorous examination ESA has selected Speedera and Capcave to stream this historic event."

The Beagle 2 lander will be released from the orbiting Mars Express mother craft on Dec. 19 and is expected to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet on the night of Dec. 24-25.

The European probe - built for ESA by a consortium of European companies led by Astrium - carries seven scientific instruments that will perform a series of remote-sensing experiments designed to shed new light on the planet's structure, geology and atmosphere as well as its potential for supporting life.

Streaming of the Mars Express mission was awarded to Capcave, the prime contractor. Capcave partnered with Speedera to provide on-demand Whole Site Delivery of ESA's Web site to ensure that high quality multimedia content will be served to site visitors, despite the massive traffic triggered by this closely-watched event.

Speedera's distributed delivery network efficiently delivers dynamic and static Web content and applications over the Internet by using servers located on multiple networks worldwide, and by intelligently routing end-users' requests to the closest available server.

"Speedera provides an optimal architecture to meet high traffic demands from planned and unplanned events," said Tim Koeleman, Founder and Studio Director for Capcave.

"ESA required a complete and elegant solution to ensure that visitors to ESA's site would be able to view this exciting and extraordinary Mars landing. Working with Speedera, we look forward to what promises to be one of the world's greatest Internet moments."

"We are pleased to be part of this awe-inspiring event set to take place on another world," said Ajit Gupta, President and CEO of Speedera Networks.

"Capcave has an excellent reputation as a total fulfillment company, with roots in traditional media, that knows how to skillfully blend in new media strategies for effective on-line execution of these types of world-scale events. We look forward to working with ESA to boost its Webcast streaming capabilities in order to bring the Red Planet to Earth for Web viewers."

In addition to assisting the European space program, Speedera is also providing global on-demand computing services for NASA. After deployment of Speedera's services earlier this spring, the NASA Web portal experienced a tremendous increase in capacity as well as a three-fold improvement in performance, breaking into the ranks of the top 10 highest-performing U.S. Government Web sites, as measured by the Keynote Government Internet Performance Index (KG40).

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