GREETINGS FROM MARS

摘要

For six and a half long hours mission controllers had been sitting anxiously with their eyes fixed on a single desktop terminal, scanning the computer screen for interplanetary e-mail. Suddenly, just about the time that the towns near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., were getting ready to load their Fourth of July fireworks, the screen bloomed with fireworks of its own. As the exuberant sound of the Beatles' "Twist and Shout" rang out in the science team's room, the JPL crew got what they'd been waiting for: the first pictures of Mars since the Viking missions of 1976.