The Martian: Lost Sols

The Martian: Lost Sols is a short story set in the middle of the novel to celebrate the ten year anniversary of The Martian novel being published.

Lost Sols shows data that was lost when Mark Watney's laptop was corrupted by additional time in space and shows the events of sols 488-491. The data was recovered by the Remote Data Analysis Department using NSA software and then sent to Venkat Kapoor.

Blurb

Whilst Watney is driving towards the Ares IV landing site, he is diverted by a dust storm that would have effected his power input. This leads him to drive a path that had not been scoped out by NASA and with Pathfinder dead he has no way to contact them. He manages to navigate the situation by himself but is almost thwarted when he comes across a 20 meter ravine, which he names The Fucking Ravine blocking his path. He has to find a way to get the Rover and the trailer across the ravine without breaking the airlock seal or any of the vital equipment and in a timely manner so he doesn't miss his ride off of Mars.

Introduction

FROM: Remote Data Analysis Department

TO: Venkat Kapoor

SUBJECT: Corrupted data in Mark Watney’s logs from Ares 3

BODY: Mr. Kapoor – As Mark Watney’s laptop endured far more time on Mars than was expected, several chunks of data within his personal log were badly corrupted from radiation and other environmental factors. We have completed our repair of one of those corrupted chunks. This data was not included in the original data provided as we considered it beyond repair. However, the NSA assisted us with software they declined to explain and we now have these additional log entries.

ATTATCHMENT:

Read the rest here on Andy Weir's Blog:

https://galactanet.com/lostsols.pdf