He repairs the Hab, but his crops are dead, threatening him again with eventual starvation.

The canvas at one of the Hab airlocks tears due to Watney's repeated use of the airlock, decompressing the Hab and nearly killing him. Mitch Henderson, the Ares 3 flight director, convinces NASA Administrator Teddy Sanders to allow him to inform the Ares 3 crew of Watney's survival his crewmates are thrilled, except for Commander Lewis, who is guilt-stricken at leaving him behind. He makes a three-week test drive to recover the unmanned Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover and brings them back to the Hab, enabling him to contact NASA.

He begins modifying one of the rovers for the journey, adding solar cells and an additional battery. Watney plans to drive 3,200 kilometers (2,000 mi) to Schiaparelli crater where the next mission, Ares 4, will land in four years. NASA eventually discovers that he is alive when satellite images of the landing site show evidence of his activities they begin working on ways to rescue him, but withhold the news of his survival from the rest of the Ares 3 crew, on their way back to Earth aboard the Hermes, so as not to distract them. With food a critical, though not immediate, problem, he begins growing potatoes in the Hab, the crew's Martian habitat, and burns hydrazine to make water for the plants. His injury proves relatively minor, but with no way to contact Earth, he must rely on his own resourcefulness to survive. Lewis, the mission commander, has no choice but to abandon the search for him, as the launch vehicle teeters dangerously. During the hurried evacuation, astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer, is impaled by an antenna that was torn loose, flung out of sight by the wind and believed dead. In 2035, the crew of the NASA Ares 3 mission to Mars are ordered to lift off from their landing site in Acidalia Planitia six days into their planned month-long stay due to an intense dust storm which threatens to topple their launch vehicle.

The martian paperback