The Martian - Science Notes -
The opening scene is meant to highlight the differences between Mars and Earth as we see a very red landscape followed by people in space suits collecting samples on the surface of Mars. When Earth is shown it always highlights the verdant land and the blue oceans while the oxygen on Mars is chemically bonded to minerals making for a rusty desert plant.
A wind storm sweeps in, separating one of the astronauts from his friends, as his friends make it to the safety of a rocket and cut their stay on Mars short to escape the storm.
While large wind storms do, sometimes, cover vast areas of Mars the force of the wind would be too low to really carry away an astronaut. Mars has an atmosphere that’s only about one percent the density of Earth’s atmosphere, and it’s mostly composed of Carbon Dioxide while Earth has an atmosphere rich in Nitrogen and Oxygen thanks to LIFE and PLATE TECTONICS.
The rest of the crew head back towards Earth thinking their friend and fellow astronaut, Mark Watney, is deceased on Mars as his suit bio-monitor indicated his space suit was broken.
Mark, however, survived the injury and made it back to their temporary Mars Habitat (“HAB”) where he patches his injury and begins to plan on how to survive for four years alone on Mars - four years is the time another mission is due to reach the Red Planet - with only about a year’s worth of food.
Some classic story-telling techniques are used including having the protagonist - Watney - “narrate” through a video journal. Also, the first act of the story sees the hero go from a “normal” situation to one where his or her very survival is challenged. The rising action of the first act shows the protagonist meet these challenges and battle back. But, as we know, the mid-point of a story will see our hero faced with a major setback.
Watney used human waste, added to Martian dirt, to make a kind of soil in which to grow potatoes to help sustain him. We saw, earlier this year, in “The Biggest Little Farm” how plants need soil to grow - which is a living ecosystem with microorganisms. Dirt is, essentially, minerals and rocks.
Also, there are several scenes showing the actor playing Watney - Matt Damon - looking muscular and healthy at the beginning of the story. This is to show his physical deterioration when he’s forced to go on a low-protein diet. This will be especially important when we study the main organic molecules in life - Nucleic Acids (DNA / RNA), lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins.
While this part of the story stretches what is possible, it does highlight the fact that Martian dirt is not able to support life, even with the addition of human waste as fertilizer.
Watney uses a catalyst - something that helps a chemical reaction take place - to break down rocket fuel and react the hydrogen gas with oxygen to make water. Recall water is two atoms of hydrogen covalently bonded to one atom of oxygen.
Water, needed for the potatoes crops and for drinking - in this movie - is the most important compound for life and critical for sustaining the chemical reactions needed for life. Also, it’s again shown repeatedly that Earth has abundant water on the surface while Mars is both cold and dry.
We studied atomic structure and in the documentary “Twisting the Dragon’s Tail” we saw how some elements are radioactive, meaning they transmute - break down - into completely different elements. Almost one hundred years ago humans used Plutonium and Uranium to build weapons that destroyed two populated cities in Japan. Post World War II we’ve used radioactive elements for energy production, medicine, geologic dating, and many other technologies.
In “The Martian” - and space travel in general - we use radioactive isotopes to explore space by using it for long-lasting power sources. Watney digs up a discarded nuclear battery to use as a heat source, as it is no longer useful as a power source but still releases heat. This is important as Mars’ thin atmosphere holds in very little heat whereas Earth has a greenhouse effect that effective keeps our plant at a habitable temperature.
Questions to think about for the second half of the story:
- Taking into account Newton’s Laws - why - when Watney’s crew mates (friends) learned he was alive - did they not, simply, “Turn around” their spaceship and go back to pick him up?
- Why does it take twenty minutes, or more, for a radio signal to traverse the distance between Earth and Mars?
- Why does The Hermes, the spaceship carrying the astronauts between Earth and Mars, have several sections that spin?
- Why does Watney have to grow the potatoes in the HAB? Why no just plant them outside in the Martian dirt after adding fertilizer?
