A scene depicting Dr. Mann and Cooper on the planet.
Mann is an ice planet that orbits the black hole Gargantua. The planet is named after the first astronaut to have landed there, Dr. Mann.
History[]
Dr. Mann landed on the planet ten years before the launch of Endurance. Upon arrival, Mann realizes his planet was uninhabitable. Mann and his robot companion KIPP dropped probes at nearby locations with the hope of finding a rocky, habitable surface, below the frozen clouds they stood on. After years of probing and exploration, they found no surface. This demoralized and infuriated Dr. Mann, yet KIPP was determined to increase the probe's range and continue their search. He cannibalized KIPP, using its power source for extra energy for his hypersleep chamber and rigging it to explode if someone attempted to access its archives which would unveil the truth about his world. When the Endurance crew arrive, they awaken Dr. Mann, who convinces them that his world is habitable.
The crew immediately begins to deliver supplies and shelters on the planet, with Cooper deciding to return home as soon as a colony base was completed. While surveying with Cooper for a suitable site for the colony, Dr. Mann, knowing his planet could never sustain human life, attempts to murder Cooper. Dr. Mann needed the Endurance to complete Plan B with the surviving crew. Meanwhile, Romilly successfully accessed KIPP's archives, which revealed the inhospitality of Dr. Mann's planet. Before Romilly could inform the others, KIPP detonates, killing Romilly. Knowing that Cooper survived and Romilly was gone, Dr. Mann decides to single-handedly take over the Endurance in order to start a colony on Edmund's planet. Dr. Mann docks with the Endurance but is unaware that the Ranger is not firmly latched to the ship. Despite Cooper and Brand's protests, Dr. Mann opens the pressurized hatch. The explosive decompression rips open the Ranger's hatch, violently throwing Dr. Mann into the docking port of the Endurance and killing him instantly.
Geography[]
Mann's frozen-cloud surface
No surface was ever found. In fact, the planet is honeycombed with seemingly endless layers of frozen ice clouds, crevices and mountains. Mann surmised this from the sublimating ice clouds, which, after a while, would totally evaporate. Therefore, the clouds must freeze and evaporate repeatedly, which Thorne believed could be caused by the eccentricity of Mann's orbit. The planet's gravity is 80% of Earth's gravity. The frozen clouds give the disconcerting view of vertical mountains. While the planet has an atmosphere, it is thick with ammonia, making it deadly to breathe. The temperature is not cold enough to be lethal during the day but is well below at least the freezing point of pure water and at most the freezing point of pure ammonia, at -108 degrees F (-77.8 C). Due to the presence and evaporation of frozen clouds, it seems improbable or even impossible that the sky is ever visible from the solid ice.
2008 Script[]
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On the surface of Mann
In the 2008 version of the script, the crew of the Endurance arrive on the Ice Planet and descend to a habitable, subterranean biosphere, inhabited by an alien ecosystem called "fractal life." They soon discover a Chinese outpost that is largely abandoned aside from a few security androids. They discover that a nearby neutron star sends out pulses of intense radiation once every 24 hours, which presumably killed the Chinese astronauts that attempted to complete its construction. Upon much searching, they fall through a crevice where they find the Gravity Box.
Trivia[]
- Dr. Mann was marooned on this planet for 35 years, as evidenced by the 23-year time dilation on Miller, the two-year trip to Saturn, and the launch of the Lazarus missions which predated Endurance's launch by ten years. Because of cryogenic hibernation, Mann's aging was significantly slowed, but his mental health suffered.