1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars

[Undertoad]

Suggested by elspode. This is the widest IotD ever
posted at 1900 pixels wide, and will cause the terrible
horizontal scrolling that we all hate so much, but for once
it's really warranted.

Because this is fucking MARS you're looking at! Come on
people!

It's a 360 degree pan from NASA's Spirit, a "rover" about
the size of a golf cart.

Apparently the landing spot was just about as ideal as they
could hope for. There's room for the rover to move around;
it's not on too sharp an angle; there aren't boulders
for it to get hung up on.

Today they reported that the rover was able to figure out
where the sun is, which meant it could figure out its
Martian heading, which meant it could figure out how to
point its "high gain" antenna back at Earth. It had to get
it pointed within a couple of degrees. And it did. It
used the same navigation techniques as ancient
mariners used. It simply used them on another
planet.

And thus they are now able to get 11850 bps downloads
from Mars to Earth. That's two 56K modems' worth of
bandwidth to send back all the Martian science-porn the
rover can find.

Today they will send back the first color photos... and we'll
see if they make tomorrow's IotD.