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Oct. 1, 2015 -- In the opening moments of the new film The Martian, a fierce windstorm hits the red planet. Astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is left on Mars as his crewmates scrap the exploration mission and head home.
That’s a bit of a problem for Watney, whose next ride home is years away, if ever. But he's determined to survive, both physically and emotionally.
The film’s producers have said that everything that happens in the movie -- with the exception of the windstorm, which was too violent for Mars -- is backed up by science.
We turned to a NASA scientist, a NASA doctor, a psychologist, and a life coach to put those claims to the test.
Note: This story doesn’t spoil the movie’s ending, but it does offer significant details.
The Mars environment looks hostile, as it should, says Jim Green, PhD, director of planetary science for NASA. He consulted with the movie-makers on the script.
The air there is 95% carbon dioxide, but Damon's character Watney and other crew-members were living in a 90-square-meter canvas structure, or ''Hab," that provided shelter against Mars’ extreme temperatures. As long as Watney stayed in the Hab or wore his spacesuit outside of it, he had oxygen.
Unlimited supplies of oxygen are theoretically possible by using technologies that recycle the carbon dioxide to get the oxygen out, says Erik Antonsen, MD, PhD, a scientist for NASA's human research program.
Food and water were another matter. (Until this week, water was thought to exist nearly exclusively as ice on Mars.) In the movie, Damon converts rocket fuel to water to keep a steady supply.
With an adequate power supply, that's possible, Antonsen says, but “likely not an experiment to try at home.”
For food, Watney had enough freeze-dried food to last more than a year, but he knows that won’t be enough. He realizes he has to figure out a way to grow food in a place with thin soil that's hostile to growth. Luckily, Watney is a trained botanist. A lightbulb goes off, and he runs over to the compartments housing the food and finds the Thanksgiving dinners for the crew. Those meals have real potatoes.
Watney uses them to plant a potato patch inside the Hab. In scene after scene, he tends to the patch, coaxing it to grow. For fertilizer, he uses his discarded poop and that of his crewmates.
Human poop can be a good fertilizer to grow potatoes, Antonsen says, but it's not without risks. Something held in check by a person’s gut bacteria -- bad bacteria, for instance -- could grow unchecked in the new environment.