Ares IV

Lore & Background

The Ares IV mission represents the culmination of years of robotic reconnaissance and incremental crewed flybys. By the time the Lander touches down, Mars has been mapped, sampled, and studied from orbit, but no human has yet spent a meaningful stretch of time on the surface. The crew's mandate is straightforward in principle: deploy instruments, collect geological and atmospheric data, conduct EVA experiments, and return to the Orion in orbit after approximately one month. The Lander is purpose-built for this—pressurized, self-sufficient for the planned window, and equipped with the Ascent Vehicle for the short hop back to orbit.

What the mission planners could not account for was the ferocity of Martian weather on a particular day. A dust storm of extraordinary intensity tears across the landing site, battering the Lander, shredding exterior equipment, and creating a chaos of flying debris. In the novel, the storm's violence is what injures Watney and triggers the crew's desperate search-and-rescue window. In the film, Ridley Scott renders the storm as a wall of ochre fury that swallows the Hab in seconds. Either way, the operational consequence is the same: the Ascent Vehicle must launch immediately, and the crew cannot wait for the storm to pass.

The emotional core of Ares IV's story is not the engineering or the geology—it is the moment of abandonment. Lewis and her five crewmates search the wreckage, find no sign of Watney, and make the most painful call of their careers: they must leave. The Ascent Vehicle carries five people back to the Orion, and the Lander's empty, battered silhouette becomes the most important object in the solar system. From that point forward, Ares IV is no longer a mission; it is a grave site, a target, and a countdown.

In Their Own Story

The wind hits at 14:00 local. One moment the EVA is routine—Beck calibrating the seismograph, Vogel logging soil cores, Watney arguing with Lewis about the potato schedule. The next, the sky goes the color of a bruise and the Lander's hull starts to sing. Lewis screams for everyone inside. The storm is not a storm; it is a wall, a living thing, and it is already stripping the solar array off the east face. Watney feels the impact before he sees it—a sharp, white-hot lance through his abdomen, then the world tilts and the dust swallows him whole. He is in the Hab. He is not in the Hab. He is somewhere in between, bleeding onto the deck plate, listening to the wind howl like a freight train with a grudge. Five voices call his name over the comms. Then the Ascent Vehicle's engines roar to life, and the sound fades, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing he has ever heard.

Reader's Guide

Ares IV touches down and the six-person crew begins their surface operations: deploying sensors, running EVA experiments, and settling into the Lander's routines. Mark Watney, the mission botanist, spends his days in the greenhouse module tending crops, a small green pocket in a world of rust and dust. The mission is proceeding on schedule, the Orion waits patiently in orbit, and the crew's camaraderie is easy and untested.

Then the storm arrives. It is sudden, catastrophic, and far more violent than any model predicted. The Lander is battered, exterior equipment is destroyed, and in the chaos Watney is injured and separated from the group. Lewis orders an immediate search, but the dust is too thick, visibility is zero, and the Ascent Vehicle's fuel and the mission's timeline both demand they launch. The crew searches frantically, finds no trace of Watney, and—after the most agonizing decision of their lives—launch the AV with five seats occupied and one empty.

Back aboard the Orion, the crew is in a state of shock and guilt. Lewis must file the report: one crew member presumed dead, Lander damaged beyond recovery, mission effectively over. The decision now shifts to Houston and the broader space community. The Ares IV Lander, still sitting on the Martian surface, becomes the focal point of an interplanetary rescue effort. The crew's role shifts from operators to witnesses, carrying the weight of what they saw and what they left behind.

The turning point of the Ares IV arc is not the landing or the storm itself, but the moment the Ascent Vehicle's engines cut off in orbit and Lewis looks at the empty seat. From that silence, every subsequent action—NASA's deliberations, Watney's survival, the Ares III rescue, the Chinese contribution—radiates outward.

Did You Know?

• The Ares IV Lander and the Ascent Vehicle are distinct vehicles: the Lander is the pressurized surface habitat, while the AV is the small rocket that carries the crew back to the Orion in orbit.
• Mark Watney's role as the mission botanist is what makes his survival plausible—he is the only crew member with the expertise to grow food and manage the Lander's life-support systems independently.
• In the novel, the dust storm that ends the mission is triggered by a specific, unpredictable weather event; the crew had no warning and no time to secure the exterior equipment.
• The Ares IV mission's planned duration of roughly one month is a critical constraint: the Ascent Vehicle's fuel and the Orion's orbital window mean the crew cannot simply wait out the storm indefinitely.