Ah, but it's not a 1909-S V.D.B., which would have been the real big money option.

Exactly, yes. :)

Is that penny the first human image on Mars? If not does anyone here know what is?

The Face On Mars, of course:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(region_of_Mars)#.22F...

Fallen Astronauts, perhaps?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Astronaut

A potentially interesting easter egg: you might notice that in the picture of the calibration target, there is a small blur in the 0 of the "1.0". Inside this 0 are the greek letters "γδβγ".

Considering that a penny in 1909 had the buying power of about $0.25 today, I wish they would have attached a quarter. (death to pennies!)

Am I the only one who thought "who's this Lincoln Penny?" (not an American here)

Lacking immediate political or economic drivers, I'd say this is realistic. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a better explanation of why this is the case https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErZq2ZQQTrs (starting at 7:45 or so)

Mars One intends to land its first crew on Mars in 2025. http://www.mars-one.com/mission/roadmap

In the realm of the feasible, SpaceX plans to land people on Mars in about 25 years.

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031732 (13 points, by Mz, 7 hours ago, 7 comments)

Yes, it was flagged to death because I submitted it per the HN guidelines with the original title. The title is very clickbaity and it was all anyone could talk about. I deleted it after it died. I emailed the moderator and asked if I could resubmit with a different title so it wouldn't go down in flames. It was resubmitted with his permission. My hope is that, the second time around, discussion can focus on the excellent writing and interesting subject matter instead of the unfortunate title (or other drama).

Usually I feel the same way about resubmissions, but in this case I'm glad you did. I work as a developer in color science and it was really cool seeing this sort of stuff being used in huge projects - I sent this off to some coworkers and I'm sure we'll be discussing this in the morning :)

I looked for a different article on the same subject (and even submitted one, which did not do well). I could not find anything else as well-written and engaging. That's when I decided to write the moderator and see if it could be ...salvaged? Not sure what the word should be. But I felt the quality of the article was worth trying to give it another shot.

Glad you liked it.

"Best I can do is $7!"

why not a banana?