I just saw the movie tonight and whilst I enjoyed it a couple of things bugged me a little:
1) No way for the habitat or the manned rover to contact Earth. In the 1979's the lunar rover had a small dish antenna and in the 2010's we have robotic Mars rovers that communicate with satellites orbiting the planet. Not having a dish antenna on the manned rover and/or the habitat was silly.
2) I know that astronauts are supposed to have 'the right stuff' but the guy finds a decades old space probe, brings it back to the habitat, plugs in the cables and the thing bursts into life. Whatever happened to different connectors, connectors being the wrong gender, different pinouts, different voltage levels and different communication protocols between the two systems?
One other thing, am I the only person to think that the female commander of the Mars mission was hotter than fire? ![Cool 8)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/cool.gif)
8/10
Re: Your last point, no you are not.
![Smiley :)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
As for antennas, it was an extensive point in the book, but like a lot of things, was trimmed or concatenated from the book.
The thing is, is that movies made from books must pick and choose what they keep, the mediums do not map one-to-one. Easy things in one medium are very tough in the other. For instance, the science in the book was presented with an ease bordering on glib. There were film critics who thought the science in the movie to be utterly impenetrable. How much do you keep in? Running time is a huge constraint in movies. More to the point, if you
do keep it in, is it still on subtext?
In one's zeal to see if they can spot technical errors or simplifications, one can easily lose sight of the story they are trying to tell. Even the most mundane police procedural makes up stuff that doesn't line up with reality. E.g., phones in police stations don't constantly ring, and cases are not neatly solved, ridiculous amounts of gunplay, etc.
Story telling conventions are there to help get across the subtext of the story, not to show how accurate their knowledge of stoichiometry is. I was personally disappointed they glossed over so many details of the mission architecture, but I understand why. How many people would have been confused by the presence of the Ares III Mars Descent Vehicle? Or the pre-supply landers that delivered the rovers and hab? Probably
a lot of people would have been, even by
one of those things. So I get it. I assumed they landed on the other side of that rocky outcropping and proceeded to enjoy the story.
The wire work for the zero-g was not perfect, but when has it been? It's impressive they
bothered to even have zero-g+centrifuges, not to mention thermal radiators! Radiators are incredibly rare in Sci-Fi movies, much less very realistic ones.
Even the previous high-water mark for big-budget sci-fi scientific verisimilitude (2001) was dripping with errors despite the fact they tried their best to have it not be so.
This is quite possibly the only sci-fi movie that had anything resembling accurate astrodynamics! There was a guy at NASA who worked out the launch date of Ares III from clues in the book!
Fun talk at NASA Andy Weir gives on Science in the book, the astrodynamics, and (amusingly) the guy who figured out the launch date showed up at the Q/A!