Americans Travel to Mars, Take Photos of Themselves, Buy Authentic Native Crafts and Chicklets

Sometimes it feels like picking on Boing Boing is a bit like kicking a puppy, and they're certainly not the generative cause of the hyperventilatory blogospheric upwelling of passion over the descent shots of the Mars Phoenix polar lander, but they actually tag their posts well enough to find them easily. And anyway, nobody's puppy, in our experience, has quite the same tendency to occasionally act like Gavin from Kids in the Hall. "You know in Europe, you only get one spoon..."

[Edited to add] Here is the slightly—and I mean slightly—more sober take from io9, which has more photos and prettier colors. Unearthed by our crack investigative team, which stumbled across this post while searching for online retailers of crack.

First, we'll post the photo. It is awful darn yip-able; it's an image of Phoenix about to land, taken from the Reconnaissance orbiter, and for all that it's really a smudge, just thinking that this is a man-made robot being photographed by a satellite in outer fucking space gets the old microfiche of the imagination clicking and warbling.



Got our "ahhhs" out?

Good, now shift your perspective just a smidge towards the cynical: we just sent a spaceship one hundred million-odd miles and had another spaceship we'd already sent one hundred million-odd miles photograph it. The mechanisms, albeit briefly, overwhelmed the point. It's not the fact that these photographs were taken that's vaguely migrainous, it's the level of excitement over taking photos of ourselves. At least the Phoenix lander wasn't passed out on the floor of the polar tiki bar having enjoyed one too many shots of Demosian sake. Yet.



{from poor, sweet, moist-eyed Boing Boing}