NASA Scientists Fact-Check “The Martian"

(crashing)

I'm entering this log for the record.

This is Mark Watney.

And I'm still alive, obviously.

The scientific accuracy of the film,

I think is remarkable.

A lot of the topography, what they show in The Martian,

we could find places on Mars that look that way,

and in particular, when they did things like

show overhead views of Mars,

it was the overhead views of Mars

that you would expect to see.

[Man Voiceover] Mark Watney's still alive.

The astronaut uses the lander

as a way to communicate back with Earth.

Well, to do that, he had to plug in a computer

that he had on his vehicle to our lander.

Well it turns out our lander had a port

that you could plug in,

that allowed him to do those exact things,

so an astronaut really could've done that

and reprogrammed this vehicle.

I gotta figure out how to grow four years worth of food.

Here, on a planet where nothing grows.

The fact that he used potatoes.

That was one of the crops that was selected

as the best that you could do

in terms of generating calories.

Whooo!

I am the greatest botanist on this planet.

For oxygen production though, it actually turns out

that wheat would be something better than potatoes,

but if you were just looking for calories,

potatoes were the right thing to use.

1200 kilometers in diameter, bearing 24.41 degrees.

That's tracking right towards us.

The windstorm event.

[Mark Voiceover] My team thought I was dead.

(screaming)

The problem is on Mars, there's only 1% of the atmosphere

that we have here on Earth,

so even if you have a hundred mile an hour winds,

that has the same force as a one mile an hour wind

here on Earth.

Having things blowing around,

and people blowing across the landscape,

this isn't gonna happen.

After that, everything was really, really accurate.

The first person to touch the surface of Mars, I think,

is going to be in my lifetime.

I think we can easily do it in 20 years,

if we want to, we could do it in less.

For us the next step is to go to Mars

and bring back samples.

We're gonna do that next with a mission called Mars 2020.

And that mission's gonna drill into rock

and collect core samples.

The first time that we study these close up

may very well be with humans that will go to Mars

in the coming decades.

I'm pretty sure it's gonna be

the most exciting human adventure of all time.