At 05:31 UTC (01:31 Eastern US time) on August 6, the Mars Science Laboratory - commonly called Curiosity - will land on the Red Planet. Because Mars will be 250 million kilometers (150 million miles) from Earth at the time, this landing procedure is totally autonomous: pre-programmed, and without human intervention. It has to be, since it will take radio signals nearly 14 minutes to reach the lander! However, we'll be able to follow the progress of the lander, since it will be sending signals back to Earth during the complicated and, frankly, terrifying deceleration process and Rube Goldbergian sequence to get down to the surface. If you want to watch the proceedings live, I have a few things you can do.
1) Fraser Cain, Pamela Gay, and I will be doing a Google+ Hangout on August 5th starting at 03:00 UTC on August 5/6 and running until 07:00 - ...
