Err isn't a Martian year longer than an Earth one?
Surely Curiosity won't have been on Mars for a year until sometime in June 2014.
Where were you on August 6th, 2012, during the “seven minutes of terror” during which the Curiosity Rover descended onto the Martian surface? Wherever you were, the minutes were aptly-named, because Curiosity landed courtesy of a “sky crane” that saw a rocket hover just long enough for the rover the be lowered onto the red …
The Mars nuke bot is an exploratory vehicle, launched from earth, so obviously it uses standard earth years as time measurement. Similar to what the babylon stations will have when we get around to building them :)
http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Earth_Year#Earth_Year
I have the highest regard for Victoria Coren Mitchell, but I think she's wrong about "sulfur".
Most British people's aversion to "sulfur" is based on a suspicion that it's an Americanism, a consequence of the misguided spelling rationalisation that gave us "ax" and "color". In fact, many European languages use "f" in their various spellings (e.g. Schwefel, soufre, zolfo). I believe the "ph" in the English spelling was actually introduced as part of the curious Renaissance fashion for making words "more classical", the same trend that added the pointless "b" in "debtor".
"sulfur" is, of course, the spelling mandated by whatever international body controls the names of elements.