quote:

ORIGINAL: slaveboyforyou
Every picture they take of Mars looks the same to me.  I just can't get all that excited about pictures that look like they were taken in Nevada. 

quote:

ORIGINAL: bipolarber

christine,

Exactly. How jaded do you have to be, when you look at a photograph taken on another planet, and go, "So what?"

Aside from the engineering feat of building something that can make it to Mars (aka the sargasso sea of space probes) chose it's own landing site, and make the decent perfectly despite the 4.5 minute timelag... there's the promise of what that probe will do once it gets into it's mission proper. Establish the existence of water ice, verify the planet's internal temperature, weather patterns near the poles, monitor the seasonal changes. All informatin vital to our understanding of planetary enviromental systems.

No one really seems to bother thinking about it, but we have learned more about the solar system in just the last 35 years than we knew about the Earth in the last 2000 years of exploration. This data has given us additional models to test our knowledge about weather systems, geological dynamics, the formation of the planets, and our own Earth's history.

Funny... did anyone else note that yesterday, the day of this probe's landing, was also the 400th anniversary of Gallileo and his family being threatened with torture by the church, unless he recanted his theory that the Earth went around the sun?

I wonder who won THAT argument of religiously inspired ignorrance?

Suck it, zelots!