I, for one, wish NASA well on this endeavour.  If it was not for NASA, and other such projects around the world we would not have known about the hole in the ozone layer, or what was going on with the various aspects of our climate going on now...

  And, still, we spend FAR, FAR, more on war toys, globally, than we spend on this...let us spend some of the defense budgets on actually helping people on this planet....oh...btw...just check out how much was spent, globally, on war toys the next time....

Well maybe but the poor generally have never ruled anyone or anything. There is an old saying, "the cream rises to the top". You could take all the worlds wealth and spit it up evenly between all people and within I would guess 10 years or less it would be back in the same hands as it is in now... IMO.
 
J

cclarry


B.  at their CLOSEST they are 35 million miles...which has not been observed               since we began keeping records. 

This event (called 'Opposition') happens once every 26 months or so. Because Earth and Mars have slightly different orbital planes, and both move in ellipses of differing eccentricity, the distance between the two planets at opposition can be more than 35 million miles.
 

C.  the TIME it would take for a RADIO wave to reach the Earth would be,
   at their CLOSEST POINT,  34 days...given that the speed of sound at
   Sea Level is 700 mph.  ( I know that "space" is different ) just using this
   as a reference point. 

 
Radio waves travel at the speed of light, not the speed of sound. It would take a radio message just over 3 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars at opposition, and around 21 to 22 minutes when they are around their farthest apart (called 'Conjunction').

My point is...if you are trying to land a vessel on a planet that is AT IT'S CLOSEST
POINT some 35 million miles away, factoring in LAG TIME (let's call it "latency" ) for ANY SIGNAL, even LIGHT, to reach Earth.  The landing would be impossible for someone HERE on Earth to perform....let alone observe, as, by the time Earth observes the landing, it should have ALREADY taken place quite a while PRIOR to the observation HERE on Earth.

I'm sure they have some SCIENTIFIC jargon to throw out there..
And I know the landings are COMPUTER controlled.

 
Well, that is roughly how it is done. They're not flying it in by remote control for the reasons you mention, but they will wait for certain telemetry and respond accordingly before 'authorising' the onboard computers to perform certain significant changes in trajectory.

But to say 
we are WATCHING the landing in "real time" is a misnomer at best.  

 
By the very fact that electro-magnetic waves (in this case light waves) travel at a finite speed, we don't really see anything in 'real time'. True, the delay at short distances may be small enough to discount for practical purposes, but it is still there. At short light-distances, the time it takes for light waves to travel from the retina and be processed by the brain is more of a factor.