Wheaton is getting close to the Ted Baxter School of Professional News Reading.

Shatner’s 81 now? His voice certainly has held up.

Most men that age are starting to sound like the comedy sidekick in a Western.

PS: Wil’s runs faster and they’re hard to keep sync. :(

Plutonium oxide would be unlikely to vaporize and disperse widely on re-entry, and so the chances are it would land in one piece, either somewhere far enough away from people, or be collected safely. If terrorists find it (although there are statistically nearly zero terrorists in the world) they could make a dirty bomb with it, but not a nuke.
Which is not to say I don’t find the 1:220 odds of a launch failure highly unsettling, if true. I’d kind of like future launches to have more explicit safe recovery plans and maybe a lower chance of blowing up billions of dollars of useful research on low-value poker-hand odds!

NASA set the odds very low for possible plutonium release during Curiosity’s voyage: 1-in-220. In the event of the rover falling back into the atmosphere and breaking up, NASA said plutonium could impact on “Earth surfaces between approximately 28-degrees north latitude and 28-degrees south latitude”. 

We dodged the nuclear Russian roulette bullet this time. But there will be plenty more to come.

It depends on what the meaning of “just” is. The forces and velocities are all known. IANAEngineer, but as a tech writer I have access to pretty sophisticated engineering software. I once tweaked a simple kinematics model of friction on billiard balls to create a hilarious model of billiards on the Moon (balls flyin’ everywhere! LOL!). That took all of five minutes, including solve time. I’ve no doubt that actual aerospace engineers and planetary scientists have run some amazing simulations. What you see in the YouTube videos are CGI animations intended for PR, not the actual mathematically-based motion simulations, which aren’t nearly as pretty, but contain much more useful information.

The only real unknown quantity in terms of simulating the Curiosity descent is the local weather conditions at the time of landing. Earth-based trials are going to be limited, because things like gravitational acceleration and atmospheric resistance don’t necessarily scale meaningfully. And Martian weather is nothing like Earth weather. Meanwhile, we’ve amassed huge amounts of data relevant to Martian mechanics from previous probes and our army of satellites.

[Disclosure: I write for a company that provides critical CAE software and support to JPL, but I can't name them here because of onerous "social media" policies regarding pseudonymity. But believe me, we're all extremely excited about this.]

 If you go to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ and the video section, you can see they made a whole series of videos called “Building Curiosity” that cover a lot of the mission testing. Notably absent is anything related to the rocket hovering thing that is going to lower rover to the surface.

You can see they did a “drop test” where they lowered it on cables like the hovering vehicle will do, but that is about it.

I don’t even see how they could do very much “real world” testing of the hovering vehicle considering they wouldn’t have any way to simulate Mars’s atmosphere and gravity.  But I still would like to see it work even in the Earth environment, but I am not sure they actually did any of those tests or they would be in the video series.

I understand your point about the need for something besides the bouncing ball. I could be very wrong, but I think a manned lander has a lot more chance of success than this automated thing. If there are people on board they are getting feedback in real time which we can’t do remotely.

I just don’t see this being successful and it is a 2.5 billion dollar bet they made. I so hope it works out.

We will receive whatever radio transmissions there are to get from the spacecraft as it lands, they will just be 14 mins after whatever happens has happened.