Was Abandoning Mark The Right Thing?

Do you believe the crew did the right thing in abandoning the search for Mark? Was there an alternative choice?

In the novel The Martian by Andy Weir the Ares 3 crew is faced with a decision to abort their mission and return back to Earth because of an approaching storm with the power to destroy their whole base, aka the Hab, on Mars. Commander Lewis revives the decision from NASA that the crew is to abort the mission although, Mark Watney does not agree. The crew prepares to leave the Hab in pairs of twos to get to the MAV so they can escape from the storm. When the crew gets outside they find that the storm is already here and they need to act quickly and get to the MAV. During the journey to the MAV, Mark gets struck by the communication dish from the Hab and is knocked unconscious and is out of sight. Commander Lewis is faced with the hard decision to leave Mark after they could not find him quickly and they had no way of contacting him. She believed if they did not leave they would be stuck in the storm like Mark.

I believe that the crew did the right thing by ending the search for Mark because the chances of him surviving the storm were almost impossible. If the crew did not leave at the very moment they did, the Mav would have been blown over by 175 KPH winds. The decision with the information that was presented to the crew was the correct one to save the majority of the crew rather than risking all of their lives. For the question of an alternative, the one alternative that I could think of is that the crew had remained in the Hab for the duration of the storm and waited it although that would have been against the orders of NASA. Waiting out the storm would have saved all of their lives and the crew could have completed the mission as planned because the Hab was still intact after the storm.