Mars The Red Planet Analysis

The connection between my article Mars, the red planet and The Martian by Andy Weir is that Mark Watney uses Mars’s two moons Phobos and Deimos to help him travel to the Pathfinder so he can communicate with NASA for help.When he travels at night he can’t see any of the landmarks like the craters to help him know the direction he is going so he uses Phobos and Deimos to help him travel. “Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field.So I navigate by Phobos. It whips around Mars so fast it actually rises and sets twice a day, running west to east. It’s isn’t the most accurate system, but it works.”(Weir 87) Another similarity with my book and the article is that the article says that dust storms are big enough to cover the planet or a large chunk of Mars and in my book on the way to Ares 4 Watney runs into a huge dust storm and he …show more content…
In the book when Watney is packing for his trip to Ares 4 he throws all his potatoes on the Martian surface so it can freeze and not stay bad. “Everything that goes in the trailer has to be comfortable in near vacuum and freezing temperatures...Nothing “bad” can happen to the potatoes. They're already dead. I've been storing them outside for months anyway. Also, they're small and not delicate.” (Weir 242) The last connection between the book and the article is the article states that Mars is not as dense like Earth so it has an escape velocity of 5km per second which is only enough to sustain a thin, transparent atmosphere. In the book the MAV must have as little weight to maintain the orbit so Watney has to figure away he can reduce the weight. “The MAV isn't going to have much weight allowance when I launch. To intercept Hermes, it'll have to reach escape velocity, but it was only designed to get to orbit. The only way to get it going fast enough is to lose a lot of weight.” (Weir