The Real NASA Technologies In 'The Martian' 60
An anonymous reader writes: On October 2, movie audiences will get to see Ridley Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's brilliant sci-fi novel The Martian, about a near-future astronaut who gets left for dead on the planet Mars. (Official trailer.) Both book and film are rooted in actual science, and NASA has now posted a list of technologies featured in the movie that either already exist, or are in development. For example, the Mars rover: "On Earth today, NASA is working to prepare for every encounter with the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV). The MMSEV has been used in NASA's analog mission projects to help solve problems that the agency is aware of and to reveal some that may be hidden. The technologies are developed to be versatile enough to support missions to an asteroid, Mars, its moons and other missions in the future." They also show off their efforts to develop water reclamation, gardens in space, and oxygen recovery.
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Yep. Three [giantfreakinrobot.com]
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Re:book was boring (Score:5, Informative)
The book was terrible. One an average of at least one god-awful mockery of science per page and the main character "scientist" who writes like an 11-year-old boy and apparently doesn't know a single technical term for anything.
The terrible science wouldn't be so bad if the author didn't keep rubbing it in the reader's face, and I'm not even talking about the "growing potatoes with about 2-3 orders of magnitude too little light while planting them stacked on top of each other like cordwood" aspect. For example, again and again he kept doing the idiot version of chemistry, like:
"Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"
(Morbo voice: "Stoichiometry does not work that way!")
It's so hard to pick the most terrible example from the book... one that's definitely a contender was the "habitat went up to 64% hydrogen and down to 9% oxygen without him noticing" part ;) Really, the high sqeaky voice didn't tip him off? The unconsciousness wasn't a clue?
Though him freaking out about the RTG was pretty priceless too... really, the whole thing is like a MST3K film in book form. I have trouble taking people seriously when they claim they thought it was a good book.
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Re:book was boring (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they don't. In science fiction, or at least hard SF, which this purports to be, you get to posit a coupe of unknown things, like faster than light travel, inertia dampers, anti-gravity lifts, space elevators, and such. After that, though, real science has to work. Two plus two still has to equal four. You can't split molecules of H2O and get some left over He as a bonus. As the GP poster notes, the amount of insolation has to be right. The fiction part, and the good writing part, comes in seeing how that characters react to the situations they are in. There are a large number of really good planetary colonization/survival stories that have been written since the 1950s. This book is not one of them.
You can always posit that magic works, but then you've crossed over into fantasy, not SF. Or, you can blur the lines a bit, as Heinlein did in Stranger In A Strange Land, which is ultimately about ethics and morals and how we treat those who are different. Whatever you do, once you set up the rules, you have to play by them. If you're going to get way more insolation than Mars actually gets, you have to tell us how, or it's a major fail with anyone who has a decent science education.
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You can't split molecules of H2O and get some left over He as a bonus.
You can never split H2O and get He. Nor does Watney in the book.
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No, but he does "chemistry" that's just as bad - that's the point you seem to be missing.
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Hydrazine (H2NNH2 or N2H4) has a molecular weight of 32.05 g/mol and a density of 1.02g/cm^3
1L of Hydrazine = 31.83 mol
1 mol Hydrazine => 2 mol N + 4 mol H
4 mol H + 2 mol O => 2 mol H2O
31.83 mol Hydrazine => 63.66 mol H2O
63.66 mol H2O has a mass of 1146g or 1.146L at STP
I think I got that right.
While his mental calculations weren't accurate to four decimal places, from a Fermi calculation standpoint he was close enough
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And that is why you liked The Martian. ;)
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Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"
Stoichiometry *does* work that way ... if you're talking about gases, and holding pressure and temperature constant.
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Which, of course, he wasn't.
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I don't really care if you don't take my opinion seriously. As such, feel free to stop reading this at this point. Hopefully others who may like the story will take your opinion with a grain of salt.
I agree that a lot of the science is not well explained, but with science fiction I always must suspend disbelief. I like Star Trek too, but c'mon - travelling through wormholes and time? Not really likely and also not the point.
I
Re:book was boring (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's a book for people who don't know science.
Which says nothing about how much volume they take up as liquids. You can only use that approach when dealing with ideal gases maintained at a constant temperature and pressure. The volume of water you get from burning a liter of hydrazine is only about 1,15 liters. Liquid density and number of moles have no inherent linkage. Do you think that if you take a bottle of styrene and polymerize it into polystyrene that it suddenly shrinks down to just a couple percent of its former size?
The author makes this mistake over and over and over again, and it's the sort of thing that would get you a D in high school chemistry.
The potatoes were there to be cooked as thanksgiving dinner, and no, it's not even slightly, remotely possible. Your lights have to replace Earth sunlight. They have him taking Mars sunlight (44% as strong) striking 200 square meters solar panels, which the author describes as "an astounding 10.2% efficiency" with no hint of sarcasm (that's actually a terrible efficiency). The panels aren't sun tracking, so you're looking at a capacity factor of 20%-ish in a sunny location *if* they're kept perfectly clean, which of course the book keeps telling us that they're not. So now these 200 square meters of solar panels are creating an electricity equivalent of the sunlight that hits 1,8 square meters of ground with the sun overhead on Earth. But wait, we're not done! Just assuming that 100% of it goes into powering the lights, you have to then account for the inefficiencies of the lights. The most efficient lighting in the world today are lab-scale LEDs with an EQE of about 30% (note: this is different from luminous efficiency, which is weighted by the frequencies the human eye is sensitive to). If we assume no other losses in the system (very much false), then we have the amount of sun that strikes half a square meter of ground on Earth... to grow 100 square meters of potatoes.
Now, there are some potential improvements there. The lights could be frequencies that plants use more efficiently than broad-spectrum sunlight. And there's the fact that the sun strikes plants at different angles (although they still intercept more than a fixed-angle planar solar panel, it's only simple cosine losses). But if you want to account for things like that, then you need to whack off another 30% or so of the energy for dust, another couple dozen percent for energy used on life support and other habitat functions, another 5-10% for wiring and conversion losses, you need to drop your light efficiencies to a more realistic 10-20%, and so forth. And where's he supposed to get lights tailored to plant growth? The book simply says he uses the habitat's regular room lighting.
It's orders of magnitude off. Which should be obvious to anyone who took even the slightest amount of time to think about what was being proposed. Or has ever seen a greenhouse where plants are grown under light. And speaking of that, he's talking about using normal room lighting to grow plants. The sun hits the surface of the Earth at about 1000W/m^2. Going with 20% efficient LED light bulbs, that means you need 5kW of light bulbs per square meter to match it. Meaning if these were say 30W LED bulbs (very bright for that sort of efficiency), you'd still be having to place 167 of them per square meter to match the sun. Is your room lit up like that?
And heck, I'm only even talking about the lighting here, it's just one of about two dozen different reasons why the entire concept as presented in the book is a complete non-starter, from him doing absolutely nothing to remove the perchlorate salts from the regolith (regolith apparently being a word that this "botanist" doesn't know - although
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Well you've certainly taught him, you professional hard sci-fi writer...
He wrote a fictional novel for entertainment. Critiquing other's work under standards it was never intended to meet is easy. Demonstrating that you can do it better is infinitely harder.
For example: You complain about the hydrazine-to-water conversion because it might yield 15% more water by volume in an ideal process? And you're insulted because the author didn't walk through calcul
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Clearly the author needed scientific review of his work, and then he could have gone through and fixed up the amounts to make things work (e.g., he would have 80 litres of liquid O2 up front instead of 50).
Hopefully the movie has fixed things - probably by removing the attempts at being scientific to make it palatable to the audience.
So maybe we can assume the solar panels aren't 10% efficient, but 40%. And that there is another power source besides solar (the article alludes to this). And maybe that growin
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The blog isn't a scientific article about living on mars. It's an article about how one proven achiever of a man is putting everything in place to make getting to Mars achievable in his lifetime. The examples are simplistic, because the reality would be tedious.
Compared to the joke that is the Mars One project, it seems achievable!
Re:Stop. Just stop. (Score:4, Interesting)
Compared to the primordial African savanna "Eden" we evolved to fit, most of the places where humans already live are unbelievably harsh. Clothing, agriculture, shelter and other simple technologies have brought us this far. Now, civilization and high-order technology are combining in ways that are about to make things really interesting.
Man plus machine form a complex that can live anywhere that physics will permit.
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Compared to the primordial African savanna "Eden" we evolved to fit, most of the places where humans already live are unbelievably harsh.
No. No: they aren't. They are all well supplied with oxygen and reasonable atmospheric pressure, in all cases you can work outside without being bombarded with deadly radiation. There are no instances of humans choosing to live in places where the ground itself is so poisonous that exposure to it would make us sick.
None.
What's more, as a general rule, humans choose, where they can, to live in environments which are generally conducive to our well being. Nobody really chooses to live in a rat infested sl
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"Unbelievably harsh" is relative the technology of the time. A few specialized people do live in Antarctica now. New islands have been created, and swamps drained. As we better at robotics and nanotech and genetic engineering, we will populate the solar system.
Promethius 1.5? (Score:3, Interesting)
>> Ridley Scott's adaptation
I saw Promethius. Forgive me if my hopes aren't that high for "The Martian."
Oh, c'mon admit it you watch MacGyver reruns. (Score:2)
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I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, that's one of my favorite things about English - given proper context, you can quite easily verb nouns and noun verbs. I think that's all kinds of interesting. (I wouldn't say that science "is" a verb - I would say that science is a noun, which is being used a verb in that sentence after having a null morpheme applied to it. Though particular verbs that get used as nouns *often* enough eventually do graduate to being full dictionary-level verbs.)
Signed,
A desc
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And I saw "Blade Runner". You ever see a great sportsman play a bad game? Movies are complicated things where a whole lot of people have to all get it right; it's not a precise science.
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We can go back to the moon, there is just no reason. Other than beating the soviets, there was no reason to go the first time.
Yes. Of course the same issue applies equally to Mars: apart from quasi-religious, nobody has articulated a reason for us to go. Hopefully the truth of this comparison will sink in before we waste too much money on this monorail venture.
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Yeah, that's what is truly unbelievable!
Space X will get there. Probably a lot later than the recent article suggested of course. And I don't know why they want to do the single-shot to Mars rather than the two-shot LEO, then Mars method. Oh well...
NASA will only get there if the Chinese start a project to get there first, and that would require their economy to turn around :-) - but NASA might get a budget in that case.
Based in parts on "Mars Direct" (Score:5, Informative)
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Thanks for the link. I've been telling people that was my favourite scene in Apollo 13 this whole time.
Frankly, the people posting hate on this book (I'm on the last chapter and have been reading it almost bouncing in my chair the whole time, all week) fill me with laughter and pity.
Guys, you are very, very literally-minded people with dull imaginations and badly need to get laid or otherwise loosen up. Novels are not instruction manuals on how to set up your BBQ. Novels are mostly metaphors. Not just t
Robinson Crusoe on Mars! (Score:1)
In Related News (Score:2)
The Mars One project just announced they were reviewing a multi-million dollar study that proved humans could build sustainable habitats on Mars.
Tag line (Score:2)
Lifeless Planet (Score:2)
Did someone think up this game after playing Lifeless Planet on Steam?
What's an "analog mission?" (Score:2)
They have digital missions?
Thanks a lot! (Score:2)
Perhaps some people here wanted to see the movie without knowing what it's about ahead of time. We're not all Americans with zero attention span, after all.
Next tiime, DON'T put a major plot point in the introductory paragraph, please.