Exploring a Planet, Revisited

Abstract

How should we place $n$ great circles on a sphere to minimize the furthest distance between a point on the sphere and its nearest great circle? Fejes T\'oth conjectured that the optimum is attained by placing $n$ circles evenly spaced all passing through the north and south poles. This conjecture was recently proved by Jiang and Polyanskii. We present a short simplification of Ortega-Moreno's alternate proof of this conjecture.