12 ways Matt Damon 'sciences the s**t' out of a hopeless situation in 'The Martian'
In the opening scene, a Martian dust storm breaks off a communications antenna and part of it gets lodged in Watney's body.
Blinded by the storm, Watney's crew believes he died and escapes without him. Watney wakes up with no choice but to "science the shit" out of Mars to survive.
FEAT OF SCIENCE #1: Watney has to pull out the antenna piece lodged in his torso. He uses a pair of medical pliers, and then staples the wound closed like a professional surgeon.
After staving off immediate death, he turns his attention to longer-term planning — like growing four years' worth of food on a planet where nothing grows.
FEAT #2: He quickly calculates how many calories he'll need each day and how much food he needs to grow from a bin of potatoes NASA sent with the mission.
FEAT #3: He cuts up potatoes, with each chunk containing an “eye” — the growth point that a new potato plant can emerge from — and covers them with Martian soil.
FEAT #4: There's no liquid water on Mars, but he needs water to grow up those potato chunks. So he uses chemistry to make water from rocket fuel.
It takes him a couple tries to get the dangerous chemical reaction right, though.
FEAT #5. Watney also needs fertilizer for the potatoes, so he mixes his and the crew's fecal waste into the soil. Yum.
And voila, a potato farm, all thanks to clever botany.
After buying himself some time, Watney works on science-ing a way communicate with NASA to tell them he's still alive.
FEAT #6: So he soups up a rover with extra solar panels to make the vehicle's battery last longer...
FEAT #7: ...Digs up a radioactive plutonium battery to help power the rover and keep himself warm on Mars' bitterly cold surface...
FEAT #8: ...And then figures out how to drive across Mars to pick up NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft — a relic from the 1990s.
FEAT #9: He gets Pathfinder operating again, then beams a message back to Earth using the spacecraft's rotating camera.
But Pathfinder has no direct communication receiver. It could take ages for NASA to send Watney messages by pointing its camera at signs staked into the ground.
FEAT #10: So Watney comes up with a special code (based on the hexadecimal system) to speed up communication with NASA.
But that's only the beginning of Watney's problems — and his feats of perseverance and ingenuity to solve them.
FEAT #11: Later, he has to mend his space habitat when an airlock explodes and blows a hole in his only shelter.
FEAT 12: He also has to figure out how to dismantle most of a giant spacecraft, wrap some tarp around it, and ride it into space.
Mars is frustrating, and it puts up a good fight.
But Watney definitely sciences the shit out of it.
We won't spoil the other life-saving feats Damon's character pulls off. Look for the movie in theaters everywhere on Oct. 2.
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