I was so happy to be invited to provide commentary after the movie The Martian at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington.  They have this cool grant for scientists to provide commentary after watching a movie to the community.  It was a hoot.  And it jives with my message in my first community book.

Okay so the Knicks were playing.  Go Knicks!  So, the theater was only half full.  Still there were a lot of really cool people from all walks of life that attended last night’s event.

It was my actual job last night to go watch a movie, eat popcorn, and bullcrap about science.  I have made it in life! 

It was fun too.  Lots of great questions.  I tried to promote space exploration and the science as much possible.  And I also promoted social workers!  You really can’t give me a mic.  I will just start talking about anything.   HAHA!  I worked hard to not say anything stupid – which is pretty hard for me – but I tried.

I got pressed to think of something from the movie where there was bad physics.  There wasn’t anything too terrible where I winced – And I do wince when watching movies from time to time.  The biggest thing that I had read was that the atmosphere is not very dense so that it is likely that the dust storm from the movie was exaggerated.  To the extreme end of this I said I thought the way they depicted tornados in the movie was too dramatic. 

But actually there are tornados on Mars.  Who knew?  They are called Dust Devils.  https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Dancing_dust_devils_trace_raging_winds_on_Mars

I am going to stand by with what I think I said last night.  “I don’t know if tornados exist on Mars, but if they looked like they did in the movie it would be terrifying. They wouldn’t me too bad because the density of the atmosphere is so low.”  And they really don’t look too bad when you see the images from the rover. 

The density of Mars is 1% of the Earth.  The drag force is goes like the density times the velocity squared.  So a 20 mph wind on Earth would feel like a 200 mph dust devil on Mars.