In ‘The Martian’, Mark Watney dealt with a number of dangerous situations and nobody was aware what would happen if the camp gets hit by a solar storm. Solar eruptions can put both people and spacecraft in danger. The radiation flowing at such events can short-out sensitive electronics, giving astronauts an overdose of radiation, if they’re not careful.

On Earth, there are a number of warning systems set up to help the satellites and astronauts in orbit, to help out the planet but Mars has presented a special challenge: it’s quite further away.

Scientists don’t know about long-term exposure levels as the radiation studies of the surface are just the beginning. So far there are no people there but NASA and other space agencies have a fleet of spacecraft there that are carrying out observations to find out how best to guard them.

There are two types of solar eruptions. Solar flares are a quick flash, travelling at the speed of light, and take eight minutes in reaching Earth and at least 14 minutes to get to Mars. Alex Young, associate director for science in the heliophysics science division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said that it’s not much time to scramble out of the way.

Second kind of solar eruption is coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They are clouds of particles, speeding along quickly, and take a number of hours to a few days in reaching Earth. When talking about Mars, there’s 50% more warning, which means it might take the fastest-moving CMEs 27 to 30 hours for the particles to get there. But they have higher energy and last longer than the solar flare, which might result into higher radiation exposure.