NASA shuts down moaning viewers who rage over 'wrong' answer on The Chase

You can’t argue with NASA, can you?

Viewers have flocked to Twitter and accused ITV game show ‘The Chase’ of awarding a contestant £1000 for giving an incorrect answer.

Before facing The Beast, presenter Bradley Walsh put this question to 30-year-old contestant Mo: ‘What profession is Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney in Hollywood blockbuster The Martian?’

Mo, pictured above left, replied with the answer ‘astronaut’ and Bradley accepted it, awarding the IT consultant £1000. But viewers at home couldn’t handle it.

Anyone who has seen the 2015 movie will know that Mark Watney (Damon) was, in fact, a botanist, and his profession was the key to his survival on the red planet.

What’s more, in the original book by Andy Weir, the character introduces himself as a botanist with a mechanical engineering qualification.

Mark says: “I’m a botanist and mechanical engineer; basically, the mission’s fix it man who played with plants.”

He adds later on in the text: “Hell yeah, I’m a botanist! Fear my botany powers!”

However, NASA refers to the character as an ‘astronaut’ in an article from 2015, stating “Matt Damon, who stars as NASA Astronaut Mark Watney in the film ‘The Martian’ participates in media interviews…”

Surely this clears up the confusion?

And a rep for The Chase told Miror TV defended Bradley, saying: “Before each recording of The Chase, similar to every other quiz show, we decide on the acceptable answers to each question, based on the advice of our outside verifiers. Matt Damon’s character was a botanist, but he was also clearly trained to go into space, which is the dictionary definition of an astronaut. Both answers were acceptable and we were prepared to accept either, thus we accepted Astronaut.”

Mo reached £5,000 in his cash builder but was caught by The Beast before making it to the Final Chase.

Despite the game show being rocked with “fix” allegations over the past few months, Bradley, 56, is adamant the programme isn’t staged and allows him to mess around with the contestants.

He said previously: “It goes from strength to strength. It’s a fantastic achievement… I never see the questions, so the beauty of it is sometimes I know it, most the time I don’t, and then we have a bit of banter. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a sensational format.”

Do you think that Mo was wrong?