Videos: Where are Curiosity's science instruments and how do they work?

Planetary Radio producer Mat Kaplan and I recently recorded a couple of videos about Curiosity and all its instruments, standing in front of a model of the rover at JPL. I had last seen this model more than a year ago, and was pleasantly surprised with how much it's been tinkered with since then; many more features have been added or altered to make it more similar to the real thing. (The most important detail they took care of: switching the eyes to the two different-sized apertures of the MastCam.)

One note about these videos: Several times, I mention there being 16 cameras on the rover. There are actually 17. Here's a blog post about the seventeenth.

There is still one more video to be posted from this session, one made especially for kids, explaining how Curiosity will be a robot geologist. That video will probably be premiered at Planetfest on Saturday and posted here some time after that! Here's a teaser photo from that segment: