When you wake up the next morning and realize everyone left for Earth… (Credit to 20 th Century Fox) In a real, puny Martian wind, nothing doing: the mission would’ve been just fine, with no evacuations and no stabbings.Įxhibit 2. So unless someone attached that antenna to the Hab with scotch tape, there’s no way the winds of a Martian sandstorm were blowing it anywhere – let alone straight through Mark Watney’s spacesuit.ĭon’t forget, the crew’s panicked evacuation was sparked by that heavy spaceship beginning to topple over in the storm. So we’d need winds of 550+ mph on Mars to achieve the same effect – and the strongest winds on Mars top out at 60 mph, according to NASA. On Earth, winds of 55+ mph are necessary to result in “considerable structural damage” like that seen in The Martian . This means that on Mars (where the atmospheric pressure is about 1% that of Earth’s) you’d need a wind ten times faster than one on Earth to achieve the same wind force and, therefore, the same damage. Where r is the atmospheric density and u is a height-normalized wind velocity. In fact, the shear stress exerted on the ground by wind is given by: But wind is just the motion of air particles, and anyone recalling basic physics can guess that in an atmosphere only a fraction as dense as Earth’s, the motion of some very far-apart air particles is not going to exert very much force. “Sure, that sort of thing happens in big storms on Earth all the time,” you might think. The broken antenna was blown off the space base, known as the ‘Hab’, in a huge sandstorm. However, at this point alarm bells should be ringing in your head. “Immediate danger of suffocation” should be high on Watney’s priority list! In fact, he’s only saved because not all of his oxygen reserves have escaped by the time he wakes. Because the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low, any oxygen in your spacesuit will quickly escape if that suit is punctured. Less than one percent is oxygen – compared to 21% on Earth. Unlike good ol’ Earth, Mars’ atmosphere is thin and mostly composed of carbon dioxide. Mark Watney is stranded on Mars, completely alone, when his spacesuit is punctured by a broken antenna after a freak accident during an emergency takeoff. Let’s start with the most immediate problem.
But I still feel worse for the guy left behind… (Credit to 20 th Century Fox)
It’s gotta be a tough call to leave someone behind on Mars.
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