The thing I like about the the story is that while he's a scientist he has to apply
his scientific knowledge to extend his survival until the rescue mission can arrive.
This is what engineering's all about. I think that dust is going to be a big problem
in the exploration of Mars, as it was on the moon.
The winds on Mars can pick up lots of dust and put lots of dust particles in
the air like at noon on Mars can be almost as dark as midnight. What they got
wrong is that that does not happen like four to six times a year, it happens maybe a few
times in part of Mars. But once every five years or so they cover the entire
planet. We have a sight in Owens Lake, California that's a dry lake bed: the
largest source of dust in the U.S. We have a network of sensors that operate
continuously so we use that place as a test bed for instruments that one day
we want to send to Mars. if you are able to protect yourself to be able to filter
that dust then this is not going to be a huge problem so I think it's more a
question of having the resources to survive. Oxygen to breathe, food and water.
Mars is an extremely harsh environment, very cold temperatures. Because the atmosphere is
so thin and there's no magnetic field on the whole planet, the surface is constantly
bombarded by radiation from the Sun.The lead character, Mark Watney, he overcomes
this by moving his farm indoors into his domed habitat; much like this
greenhouse. It provides warmth, it provides light and it provides shelter from the
radiation which they must have had in place in order to help humans working
there.
The soil on mars has the basic chemicals that a plant might need but there's no
life present in the surface soil. In the book again, Mark Watney enriches the soil
by using a combination of small amounts of Earth soil that were were brought along
on the trip for experimental use and his own, shall we say, fertilizer. I think that
would be the only way that he could possibly create the soil. At the
University of Michigan's Space Physics Research Lab, we're currently working on a new
instrument that's going to be launched in 2018 on the European Exo-Mars Rover that is
specifically designed to look for more complex forms. This rover has something that's
never been taken to Mars before and that's a drill capable of drilling
two meters into the surface which then will give us an opportunity to look at
the conditions below the surface which has never been done before.
The quickest as we can basically do it with chemical propulsion is six to eight months.
NASA is currently working on what's called the SLS or the Space Launch
System which is going to be a new rocket which will rival the Saturn 5 which we used
to get to the moon but even that rocket still's going to be limited by astrodynamics. So
there's only some times during their orbits where they actually orbit and
they're close together in distance .Other than that, they start to get farther and farther
apart and it's every 22 months that Mars and Earth basically get into this closest
point, which is what we want, to minimize the amount of fuel and decrease the
amount of time it takes to get to Mars. Now the book did talk about Ion
Propulsion and that is a technology which may sound futuristic but actually is
used already on hundreds of satellites. It's extremely fuel-efficient but the amount of
force is equivalent to, like, pieces of paper or the weight of paper clips in
your hand. It is really low force so that to be even be conceivable like in the book we
would have to have also a fictional nuclear reactor that was way beyond what we
currently can do in terms of being lightweight but providing the immense
amount of power required to generate the force for these rockets to get there
quickly. For many years now we've been looking at these ion thrusters which
will be very important for placing cargo on mars and supporting a manned mission
but they're not powerful enough to be able to rescue a man from Mars. You know
like any good story, some of the scientific theories that he uses are
stretched a bit but I think it's all grounded and pretty good science. Like we
learned from Apollo 13, we are very resourceful when we are in those
stressful situations. We can be creative and come up with
nice ways to survive. You know I think his chances of survival are pretty
good so...we'll see. (laughs)
So the CADRE satellite is a precursor to a future mission called ARMADA, we're
going to have large constellation of satellites that go to low Earth orbit and
study the atmosphere. So before we put spacecraft on the rocket there's a lot
that goes into...