Bolded for emphasis.
Whoever proposed that idea had some serious PowerPoint skills.
I’m bumping this thread because in a bit over 24 hours Curiosity will hopefully touch down safely on the Martian surface.
Wikipedia’s got a nice photo comparing the relative sizes of Curiosity to the previous rovers:
It weighs five times what Spirit and Opportunity did and is nuclear powered!
AP News story: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_MARS_CURIOSITY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-08-04-17-40-46
NASA has a damn good track record at 6 out of 7 successful landings; I hope this makes 7 out of 8.
Quoting myself only because I am psyched to see his work come to fruition. My colleague and hubby will be at mission control for the landing!
It also has a laser capable of vaporizing rock (well, small samples thereof)
at distances of over 20 feet.
But fear not, hypothetical Martians! Our increasingly large and well-armed robots are for purely scientific and peaceful purposes!
Yes…our plans continue to advance! I mean, uh, plans for peaceful scientific exploration, of course.
Here’s the link to the NASA TV online schedule, and you can click buttons there to watch the channel(s). Looks like coverage of the descent starts at 10 pm Central Time.
So, there are watching parties for the landing all over the country according to Gizmodo. Well, almost. According to this cool custom Google Map, there isn’t one anywhere near me in the cultural and scientific wasteland of South Jersey. 
It will land - or not - while I’m on my way into work tomorrow. I will have the radio on.
Just read a story in Saturday’s newspaper about this. It quoted Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as saying: “It looks a little bit crazy. I promise you, it is the least crazy of the methods you could use to land a rover the size of Curiosity on Mars.”
I am so excited for this landing and following mission.
I couldn’t imagine the stress the team must feel right now!
A propos of nothing: one of the guys who drives Curiosity (and drove Spirit and Opportunity) is the boyfriend of a good friend of mine, who sang in church choir with me for a few years while she was doing her PhD in planetary science. She was on the team tasked with extricating Spirit after it was bogged down in the sand, and is also on the Curiosity team (her father was an astronaut).
There’s an article about them on the front page of CNN here, although I would like to point out that she did not go to the University of Washington in St. Louis, she went to Washington University in St. Louis.
I’ll be watching. I’m a robotics engineer, part of the MSL science team, and now part of the ChemCam instrument team as well. I’ll be following the landing from the headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency, just outside of Montreal, and live-tweeting the landing progress and related events. I’m at @CosmicRaymond, and you can follow hashtags #MSL and #CSATweetup, not to mention @MarsCuriosity itself.
I may not be able to follow this thread super closely during the landing process tonight, though 
If you’re curious, my role is in autonomous science data processing – interpretation of geological and atmospheric scenes. I’m basically developing new techniques in machine learning and image processing to support the mission’s science goals. You can hear me and my colleagues from my university talk about the mission and our role here, and hear me interview Roger Wiens, principal investigator for ChemCam (that’s the rock-vapourizing laser) here. (Those are mp3 podcast about half an hour long each).
We’re all very excited with the landing now only ~10 hours away. I have every confidence that the people who’ve developed the landing system have done their very best. However the entry and landing go, today will be a big day for planetary exploration.
Crossing fingers…
Currently it is 9 hours and 45 minutes to go.
I am SO excited to watch the landing tonight! I’m on vacation in the Outer Banks, so I was worried I’d miss it, but we’ve got a huge TV with internet hookup, so we nerdy types will be watching live!
7 Hours and 44 minutes to go…
Six hours until the live coverage begins, I am having trouble sitting down. Excited and scared
CAPT
I keep looking at the details of the entry and landing. There are so many things that have to happen. I mean brute physical events, where some damned little part could get jammed up. Components that have to separate at the right time (but not too early or too late); lines and connections that have to not get tangled up, and also have to separate properly at the right time (but not too early or too late). Bits that have to fly away and not crash on top of the other, important bits. Not to mention all the software to control it all. It is amazing.
Break a retro-thruster, Curiosity! Stick that landing!
How soon, at what time, will we have good or bad news?
Don’t have the NASA channel, is there any coverage on cable anywhere?
In the mean time I’ll be watching Breaking Bad and checking MEBuckner’s link.
Pff, Nevermind, I see the links on that page. :smack: