I found a clip online. I won’t link because it’s probably not legal. But here is his speech.
*I’ve been thinking about laws on Mars. There’s an international treaty saying that no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. By another treaty if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is international waters.
Now, NASA is an American non-military organization, it owns the Hab. But the second I walk outside I’m in international waters.
So Here’s the cool part. I’m about to leave for the Schiaparelli Crater where I’m going to commandeer the Ares IV lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can’t until on board the Ares IV. So I’m going to be taking a craft over in international waters without permission, which by definition … makes me a pirate.
Thanks. I think that’s stretching it in the movie, because Nasa is still in contact with him on the journey, so someone is giving him permission. It made more sense in the book, when really no one could give him permission yet.
There was one scene where Watney was in the HAB and the rover was driving around, seemingly on autopilot. I viewed it as his ‘dog’ for a moment. That made me wonder if they will ever use robotic “pets” on long-term missions. We already have robotic dogs and cats which are sold as toys. With those toys becoming more and more lifelike, it seems we’ll reach a point where a person could almost feel they were real and could provide feelings of companionship just like a real animal could.
It was the roving probe from Pathfinder. It was a real short scene towards the end where Watney is in the background standing by a counter and the rover is in the foreground. It only lasted a few seconds. Hopefully I didn’t imagine it.
In the book he couldn’t fix it, and this was important because if NASA had control of the pathfinder robot they could have come up with a more efficient way to communicate than just rotating a camera to different hexadecimal letters.
I liked the film, thought it was a little slow but fairly entertaining. The writing and acting were very good and effects was perfect to my eye. I loved the pathfinder and rover coming into play. But I did have a problem with why they sent a botanist without sending some plant growing projects. This bit was odd. I think I would have written him as a microbiologist or bacteriologist that had a minor botany instead.
From the book, Watney was supposed to try to grow grasses and ferns in Martian regolith. After being stranded he needed calories, and quickly, so he had to shift gears to turning the hab onto a potato farm.
Actually, he *was *something like that. An engineer, or something. Which is how he was able to extend the range of the Mars Excursion Vehicle, among other things.
One thing about the potato farm, that I haven’t seen addressed here yet.
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if this question is answered there, either.
How’d he get enough light? I moved my herb windows boxes inside, right next to the glass patio door, and they’re still suffering a bit from reduced illumination.
Was the inside of the hab (kitchen? it was in the movie) well-enough illuminated to provide adequate vegetative growth, when the entire hab had to be powered by a smallish solar array? The ground area of the solar array looked about the same as the ground area of the kitchen, so if the solar array was dedicated 100% to powering the greenhouse lights it still wouldn’t be enough unless the solar arrays were amazingly efficient, and the rest of the hab was mostly unpowered.
In the book, it was artificial illumination…
By setting the Hab temperature to a balmy 25.5°C, I can make the plants grow faster. Also, the internal lights will provide plenty of “sunlight,” and I’ll make sure they get lots of water (once I figure out where to get water). There will be no foul weather, or any parasites to hassle them, or any weeds to compete with for soil or nutrients. With all this going for them, they should yield healthy, sproutable tubers within forty days.
Also in the book, he had more solar cells than the movie showed…
The solar cell array was covered in sand, rendering it useless (hint: solar cells need sunlight to make electricity). But once I swept the cells off, they returned to full efficiency. Whatever I end up doing, I’ll have plenty of power for it. Two hundred square meters of solar cells, with hydrogen fuel cells to store plenty of reserve. All I need to do is sweep them off every few days.
Chlorophyll isn’t as efficient as solar panels, by afactor of about 8. So he could have tuned LED grow lights in the dome to the absorption spectra of Chlorophyll, so he doesn’t waste power on colors they don’t use (this is quite doable - you can buy multi-LED adjustable lamps now) and he must have had the best quad junction solar panels money can buy (probably 50% efficient, while Chlorophyll is less than 10% efficient)
That’s the critical point. The movies undersized the solar farm. My guesstimate is that you’d probably need to gather solar energy from an area at least double the area to be illuminated to overcome conversion inefficiency and produce comparable illumination energy for the plants. Tuning up the LEDs for greater grow-light spectral efficiency might help, although I don’t know how that would work for total illumination. At some point, spectral tuning means reducing output of LED elements not in the desired frequency range, so you’re reducing the total output of the LED. The necessary assumption is that the light output is bright enough for the plants to flourish if you effectively turn down part of the lighting (out-of-growing-spectrum), but energy consumption would be more efficient.