The Martian: Just How Accurate is the Physics in the Film?
The Martian is a film that follows Mark Watney, a botanist who gets stranded on the Red Planet after a severe dust storm forces the crew of the Ares III to evacuate. However, they left without Mark Watney, a botanist, who, during the sandstorm, gets knocked back by a satellite dish and is presumed dead. However, he is not, and he spends the majority of the film trying to figure out how to survive on Mars with limited communication with NASA. The film was positively received by critics, receiving a 91% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as receiving a nomination for Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards amongst its seven nominations. However, the purpose of this blog post is to analyze just how realistic the space physics are portrayed in the movie, as according to Phil Plait.
Plait states that there are 10 major rules that movies that portray space physics like to break, so we are going to look at these ten rules and determine if the Martian breaks any of these rules.
1) Whoosh! Our Hero's Spaceship Comes Roaring Out...
Sound needs something to bounce off of. Space is a vacuum, and, as such, there is nothing for sound waves to bounce off, so there would be no sound in space. The movie violates this rule, because when Watney is leaving Mars and is heading towards the crew of the Ares III, you can hear the rockets in space, even though you should not be able to.
2) ...of a dense asteroid field...
The vast majority of asteroids in space are located between Mars and Jupiter. According to Phil Plait, if you collected all the asteroids in the main belt and balled them up, they would be in total the size of a grain of a sand. If you were to travel through space, you could spend months without seeing an asteroid. In The Martian, this does not come up at all, so the movie neither violates nor follows this rule.
3) ...banks hard to the left...
There is no air in space, so there is no way for a space ships to turn without firing a rocket in the opposite direction that you want to turn. In the Martian, they (the producers of the movie) knew to have the crew members of the Hermes increase the orbital speed as it reduced its orbit in order to reach Mark as he is leaving Mars atmosphere.
4) ...and dodges laser beams from the Dreaded Enemy...
Since there were no laser beams fired in the movie, there is no violation of this rule.
5)...who have come from a distant galaxy...
The Martian did a really good job in terms of accurately portraying the scale of space, but there were no enemies in which Mark Watney or the rest of the Ares III to escape from.
6)... to steal all of Earth's precious water...
Since there were no enemies in this movie, there was no plot to steal all of the water on Earth. In fact, the movie takes place on Mars, so of course there is not going to be any plot to steal the water off Earth.
7) The Dreaded Enemy tries to escape Earth's gravity, but is caught like a fly in Amber
Again, there is no enemy in the Martian, and the movie in which the character tries to escape is Mars, not Earth, so there is no violation of the rule here.
8) As Stars Flash by...
This rule applies to the use of light-speed travel and being able to constantly see stars and planets in movies. Space is big and vast, so you won't be able to constantly see stars and planets and asteroids. In The Martian, there was no light-speed travel, and they could not see any stars to make a reference point, so this passes the rule, and shows us as an audience that the producers of The Martian are actually knowledgeable of how space really is.
9)... Our Hero gets a lock on them and fires! A huge ball of expanding light erupts past us, accompanied by an even faster expanding ring of material as the Dreaded Enemy's engines explode.
There are no explosions in the movie, so there is no violation of the rule.
10) Yelling joyously, Our Hero flies across the disk of the full Moon, with the Sun just beyond.
There is no moon in the movie, so there is not really a violation of the rule.
Overall, the movie would be given a GP because it did a good job of sticking to the laws of space physics, even though some of the physics regarding the gravity on the Hermes spaceship are not that realistic.
A few clarifications are needed:
ReplyDelete1. Sound requires a medium to travel through (something to transmit the sound), not something to bounce off.
2. The asteroids adding up to a single grain of sand was based off a scale model, where the Sun is the size of a beach ball. If you added up all the real asteroids, you would get something about two-thirds the size of Pluto.
In general, you didn't need to take the rules so literally. For instance, the need for water did play some role in the movie, as did gravity. And there was an explosion, when they purposefully blew the air lock to slow the Hermes down.