QUESTION:
I read that the lander and the rover can communicate at 9600 baud (depending
on conditions), but what is the data transmission rate from Mars to Earth?

ANSWER from Bridget Landry on July 15, 1997:
Actually, the downlink rate is one of the things we're most interested in,
currently.  It was originally planned that we would operate at 2520 bits per
second, but, once we landed, we found out that our high gain antenna was
much more accurate in it's pointing than we had expected.  This allowed us
to increase the data rate to 8295, which, of course, made all the scientists
VERY happy.