It was explained in the book, not mentioned in the movie that I could see. There were a lot of explanations of little details in the book that didn’t make it into the movie - understandably, as the movie would have been twice the length if they’d included everything.
They do, but ISS astronauts today are exposed to the same problem. They take precautions to minimize risk (not doing spacewalks, moving the station’s orbit, bunkering down in the escape craft, etc.) but the risk never goes to 0.
I too wondered why everyone feces were individually packaged & labeled. It seems like a highly overcomplicated set up for a toilet, and if they were monitoring everyone’s waste surely it’d make more sense to run the test on site rather than shipping it back to Earth. :dubious:
He’s probably also at an elevated cancer risk from leaking hydrazine in his food-growing area. That stuff’s pretty nasty.
Bu-bu-but hydrazine is an antioxidant, and those are supposed to cure cancer.
Did anyone else think of ***Echoes ***every time they showed the “Sol count”?
I think one movie poster I saw did have the Rover sunk in sand if not outright turned over. On a similar note, one preview we saw played Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,” but that wasn’t in the movie either.
Yes, 39 minutes longer than the same cycle for Earth.
They probably had enough to do without having to dig through everyone’s shit for testing. Or maybe the Astronaut Union managed to get them off that duty.
Just what were the crew’s specialties? There were six of them. Watney, of course, was a botanist. The older of the two women was the commander (and also a pilot). The younger woman was the communications specialist (which also entails electronics and computers). One of the other men was a chemist (the guy who made the bomb), and another was another pilot (the one who controlled the MAV on launch, and who was keeping it upright during the dust storm). Who was the last guy?
And it was a bit hard to match up the names to the faces. We saw a lot of their names on the Mars base, where Watney was going through their stuff, and we saw a lot of their faces on board the Hermes, but seldom both together.
There’s a nice Ares 3 mission/crew guide here.
That would be Beck. He was the mission doctor. I forget his other specialty, but that was his main gig.
The book goes more into the onboard romance between him and Johanssen, the latter of whom was supposed to be quite a cutie in the book, but I was not that happy with the actress who played her, at least not looks-wise.
I am not a chemist. What is left over after it burns to make H[sub]2[/sub]0?
I thought that represented some malnutrition disease, from a diet of nothing but those damn spuds.
That title slide reading “7 Months Later” covered a helluva lot, didn’t it?
Hydrazine reacts with the catalyst to make nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia, and then the hydrogen burns to make water. So the worst you get from the reaction products is ammonia, which isn’t that bad. The danger is the hydrazine itself, any that manages to avoid reacting with the catalyst and makes it past the flame on the exhaust vent is going to be bad news.
I thought it was dirt, he hadn’t enough water for a real shower.
Does anyone recall from the book? He tells his crew mates, "I haven’t had a bath for (some period of time).
This was obviously simplified for the movie. For good reason as we could have spent an hour on his trials and tribulations with making water.
In the book:
First, making water from hydrazine is a multistep affair. He carefully pours the hydrazine over the iridium catalyst which separates the hydrogen from the nitrogen (which is all that’s in hydrazine) and that produces a tremendous amount of heat. Hydrazine is a mono-propellant after all. He catches the hydrogen in a tent and directs it towards a flame burning shavings from the wooden cross and that makes water. He works slowly not producing nor wanting enough hydrogen to provide a steady flame on its own. The hab gets hot and humid. The water reclaimer works on reducing the humidity but the hab has no air conditioning. Why would you on Mars? Eventually the hab heat would be radiated away so he just lives with it.
Then he realized that he wasn’t producing enough water. It was hard to tell exactly how much water he was actually making as the crop soil was soaking up a lot or at least he hoped it was. When he realized too late that he was far behind on water production he took a sample of hab air and took it to the rover for analysis. More than 60% hydrogen. A bomb needing a spark.
He realized too late that not all the hydrogen was getting burned. Some of it (a lot of it?) was getting past his little torch and accumulating.
He determines that hydrogen is only dangerous in the presence of oxygen. So if he can trick the atmospheric regulator to pull out all the oxygen he can go after the hydrogen with a tank of oxygen and a sparker device burning it a little bit at a time as he squirts oxygen into it. Wearing a space suit of course.
But the problem with that is it will kill his soil as the bacteria need oxygen. The he realizes that bacteria deal with winters so he can force them into hibernation by lowering the temperature to just above freezing.
But that will kill his plants which are just about to sprout. So he bags up the plants and uses a space suit to move them to the rover for the time being.
So he does all that and then still makes a mistake. He figures he can make do without a suit as the pressure is fine so we just wears a bunch of clothes against the cold and a oxygen breather mask. More range of motion than in a space suit. Everything goes well for a while burning little bits of hydrogen here and there. Then there’s a big explosion, like the one you saw in the theater.
He forgot that when we exhale there’s still some O2 left. Eventually he exhaled enough O2 to make a really big kaboom. Lesson learned. Good news is he burned off almost all the remaining hydrogen without killing himself. Then he cleaned everything up and repotted the plants.
Seriously, the entire book was like this. One damned problem after another. I loved the book but I also love the movie. I understand why they couldn’t keep all of what I just typed.
In the book:
Lewis: commander and geologist
Johanssen: sysop and reactor tech
Martinez: pilots the MDV and MAV
Vogel: chemistry
Beck: medical doctor and biologist
Watney: botanist and mechanical engineer
Ah, OK, the line about forgetting to account for exhaled oxygen didn’t really make sense in the movie (though it moved on quickly enough to other awesome stuff that it didn’t stand out). The context makes that work much better.
And I should have realized that one of them would have to be a medico.
And just for a contraraian opinion, Camilla Long absolutely trashed The Martian in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
She goes on and on, citing his lack of charisma, mocking the NASA director for having the name “Teddy”, and being especially critical of the poor plotting and the lack of Watney’s back story.
Well, now I know which critic’s opinion NOT to trust.
Evidently he was wearing a space suit designed for EVA (space walks) in orbit. That alone should provide a lot of protection. And I’m pretty sure what they said in the movie is correct - the atmosphere is so thin that you don’t need much of a protection. (The rest of the movie was wrong about what the atmosphere can do - the air is so thin, it shouldn’t be able to blow things around like that, let alone blow the makeshift canvas cover inwards while the HAB is pressurized.)
What I do wonder about is, since the MAV doesn’t need much protection, why did it have such a heavy nose cone? It may have been for entering the atmosphere and slowing down, but then it should have been detachable.
While on the topic, the MAV should have had a separate landing stage that stayed behind on Mars. Not only is it a sensible design, but it was an important plot point in the book - that’s where Watney got the hydrazine to make the water from.
I have a lot of small gripes like these, but overall I loved the movie.
The bit about ET is the high point of that article.