Watney spends more than 500 sols (or Martian days, which are only 39 minutes longer than our days) stranded on Mars, not to mention the back and forth flights in the crew’s mother ship. A one-way, 180-day trip alone would subject them to 15 times the annual permissible dosage for workers in nuclear power plants. Astronauts would be exposed to two kinds of dangers as they traveled to and from Mars and worked on the surface: solar energetic particles and galactic cosmic rays. The problem of Martian radiation is another tricky issue. But in the violent one Weir invents for his story, the fix wouldn’t last a day. That might actually be enough to do the job in the tenuous atmosphere that does exist on Mars.
When a pressure leak causes an entire pod on Watney’s habitat to blow up, he patches a yawning opening in what’s left of the dwelling with plastic tarp and duct tape.
It was exceedingly cool actually, and for that reason Weir’s liberty could almost be forgiven, but then the story tries to have it both ways with the same bit of science. “Plus, I thought the storm would be pretty cool.” “I needed a way to force the astronauts off the planet, so I allowed myself some leeway,” Weir conceded in a statement accompanying the movie’s release.
That sets the entire castaway tale into motion, but on a false note, because while Mars does have winds, its atmosphere is barely 1% of the density of Earth’s, meaning it could never whip up anything like the fury it does in the story. Much more disturbing is what is arguably the most important plot device in the movie: the massive windstorm that sweeps astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) away, causing his crew mates to abandon him on the planet, assuming he has been killed.
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