The image of a Martian crater taken by the HiRISE camera of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This shows the actual location of the coordinates where the protagonist Mark Watney is isolated in the novel The Martian./Courtesy of HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

This close-up image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)'s HiRISE camera shows eroded craters and wind-blown sediments in the southern Acidalia Planitia. It appears in striking blue in standard HiRISE color, but to the human eye, it would likely appear grayish or with a slight reddish tint.

However, unless one is Mark Watney, the protagonist of Andy Weir's science fiction novel 'The Martian', no one has seen this terrain in person. The novel depicts the adventures of astronaut Watney, who is stranded at the landing site of the fictional Mars mission 'Ares 3'. And this HiRISE image corresponds exactly to the coordinates of that landing site.

To gauge its size, Watney's 6-meter diameter residence amounts to about one-tenth the diameter of the large crater in this photograph. The coordinates for 'Ares 3' landing site are actually about 800 kilometers north of the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, where the Pathfinder landed in 1997.