In the newly released The Martian, a stranded astronaut must figure out how to survive on the Red Planet after being accidentally left behind when the rest of his crew escapes a violent dust storm. Explorer Mark Watney spends many months trying to make water, grow food and send an SOS signal back to Earth. Most of the tools he uses in the film, which opened Oct. 2, are based on existing or in-development technology. The one major exception is the radiation-blocking material that allows Watney to spend much of his days outside his habitat, on the surface of a planet that lacks Earth’s atmosphere and is thus bathed in significantly higher levels of damaging radiation.
“In the book they have this really thin, light, flexible material that blocks all radiation,” says Andy Weir, author of the book The Martian on which the film was based. “There’s nothing even remotely like that in the real world. That was the magic I gave him so the story would progress. Otherwise Mark would have different kinds of cancer.”
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