WE DRIVE THE FASTEST CAR ON THE PLANET; Exclusive third or fourth test! Fat torque! Great grip! Eco-friendly solar power!(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Sure, headlines can be misleading. It is the fastest car on the planet. It just isn't this planet.

We drove the Mars Rover Opportunity. Okay, again, "drove'' is a bit of an exaggeration. We drove it as much as any of the eight real Rover drivers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California can drive it. More or less. You don't strap into it like a sand buggy, fire up an air-cooled Volkswagen flat four and do a wheelie. You take a look at the latest batch of pictures, use your computer mouse to plant some waypoint flags between the rocks in the pictures, then click "action'' on the toolbar and-"zwip''-there goes your Rover.

"It's actually very simple,'' said Justin Wicke, an intern from Cornell who helped write the software that drivers use to cruise the Red Planet. "It's all just trigonometry; you took trigonometry, right?''

Um, uh, well... hey, what's that button do?

That day we met with several JPL people roughly 1000 times smarter than us, something, you may argue, not all that tough to be. But these guys are smarter than anybody else on this earth and, as far as we know, on Mars.

We originally tried to drive the Rover without visiting JPL, through a free software program called Maestro that you can download yourself at http://mars.telascience.org. That program is almost exactly the same thing used by the Rover drivers. Through it, you can see recent photos taken by the Rovers and decide where you want Opportunity, or the other Rover, Spirit, to go, just like the real scientists. Download a few shots yourself and give it a try.