That is an excellent presentation from Weir. Interestingly the one other science complaint I had I dismissed as being something he'd probably researched better than me and that was the wind. I seemed to remember reading somewhere some time back that, because of the low density of the atmosphere, you'd hardly feel a 150kph wind on Mars. I figured maybe in a dust storm the inertia would be in the dust so breezed past that one of my complaints. And then Weir goes and says "yeah I knew about that, but I wanted an awesome start to the book..."
Yes, he was an entertaining presenter. The Martian wind and the radiation issues. Still, he had the science down well enough that keeping the entertainment value of these two, somewhat distorted, in the book turned out OK. I felt that mainstream readers can enjoy the SF aspect of the story while the science geeks can fantasize about some radiation-resistance mutant/cyborg or material that ends up taking humanity to Mars, one day.