By Tanner Garrity In The Martian, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) gets stranded on Mars for over 500 days and survives by growing potatoes in Martian soil with his own waste as fertilizer. The movie, fun as it was, got a lot of things wrong. (Science writer Jeffrey Kluger pointed out some of the film’s creative liberties at the time.) One factor it didn’t misjudge, though? The significance of plants in space research. Astrobotany is an exciting and emerging sub-discipline, which studies everything from how to grow food without gravity (here’s a photo of a zucchini being grown on the International Spa…