The Accuracy of Parts from The Martian The Martian is a fictional movie about an astronaut, Mark Watney, who gets stranded during the third manned mission to Mars and his survival story. This story can be broken down into three main parts. How he was stranded, what he did to survive, and the rescue mission to return him back to Earth. Each of these categories have smaller sub-sections to them. While analyzing pieces of the main parts in the movie, scientific accuracies and inaccuracies can be found. When looking at parts of how Mark Watney was stranded, the main cause is fictional and non-fictional characteristics of Mars. Before the Ares III (the name of the mission to Mars) crew started to evacuate Mars, a huge storm was beginning to occur. This storm had extreme wind
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To find out if a storm like this is characteristic of one on Mars, we need to look at what we already know. Just like on Earth, the sun warms air near the ground on Mars which causes it to rise quickly. The speed of the rising hot air displaces the higher cold air pushing it towards the ground, creating wind and moving dust particles around with it. This happens very frequently on the surface of Mars. A planetary scientist at NASA named Michael Smith (2015) said, “Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time.” He (2015) also said, “Once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them.” Even though these storms are massive in size, “winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour, less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds on
To find out if a storm like this is characteristic of one on Mars, we need to look at what we already know. Just like on Earth, the sun warms air near the ground on Mars which causes it to rise quickly. The speed of the rising hot air displaces the higher cold air pushing it towards the ground, creating wind and moving dust particles around with it. This happens very frequently on the surface of Mars. A planetary scientist at NASA named Michael Smith (2015) said, “Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time.” He (2015) also said, “Once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them.” Even though these storms are massive in size, “winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour, less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds on