He calculates that the materials provided by the Ares program can last him around 300 days, even though the mission was originally designed for about a month on the planet some supplies are redundant, and he’s only one man, instead of a crew of six. Watney does an EVA (a walk in a spacesuit) to survey the damage to the site. He notes that the possible biggest impediments to his survival, at this point, are lack of food and water, or a rupture in the Hab itself, which provides him with oxygen and protects him from the Martian atmosphere. Watney takes stock of what he has with him, and begins an audio-video journal, which records his first-person account of Martian events. When Watney comes to, the storm has died down, his suit has resealed around the antenna-shard, and he’s able to drag himself back into the Hab, the surface station (like a high-tech tent) in which the astronauts live. They gathered into the MAV and blasted off into space. The rest of the crew, reading on their computers that Watney’s vital signs were zeroed out, assumed he was dead.

During the sandstorm, a shard of antenna flew backward and hit Watney, poking a hole in his suit. But Watney doesn’t blame the crew for doing so they thought, with reason, that he was dead. He remembers there was a sandstorm, and the crew left without him. On Sol 6, Watney awakes to find that the MAV, and all the Ares crew, are no longer on the planet with him.

Ares astronauts then use a “Mars descent vehicle” (MDV) and “Mars ascent vehicle” (MAV) to travel between Mars itself and the orbiting Hermes, still in space. The Ares missions, for example, use a booster called Hermes to carry astronauts from Earth to Mars Hermes is powered by “ion engines,” a futuristic technology providing thrust with minimal energy use.

The first two Ares missions have been successful, and the US space program is highly advanced. It’s the sixth day (Sol 6) of their mission on the Red Planet, to which they’ve been traveling together for years. The novel begins with American astronaut Mark Watney trapped on the surface of Mars, without the crew of the Ares 3.

Author the martian