It must be mission critical to spread awareness since their budget cuts are getting worse and one way to correct that is to get people excited about space exploration. They now put a considerable effort in PR, involving people in the mission, sharing most of the information and making professional videos. And i believe this is why we see twitter accounts of most astronomers, satellites, rovers and other NASA properties. The NASA's ustream has been very popular lately and they have presence on every major social network. And curiosity was named after an essay written by a student in a competition organised by NASA for school students.
Nasa has been doing this for some time now, Sojourner[1], and MERs (Spirit & Opportunity) have also been named by student competitions.
I'm impressed with the reception technology that allows 'direct to home' communication at all given the power levels available.
If a transmitter and a receiver is in space, what's the furthest distance the receiver can go away from and have a 1 watt signal still above the noise floor? Assume the transmitter is a perfect omnidirectional.
About 9200 miles.
I was assuming absolute worst conditions, at 1 watt PEP.
With hardware noise reduction, we can drop easily to .1 watt and still keep everything else consistent.
Next, if we choose a directional antenna, we can also greatly magnify directed output. No sense in directing energy in the ground, is there?
We can also have receiver systems (dish arrays) that can provide great gains in reception and transmitting.
I think NASA should receive big kudos for taking that real risk.