Scientists Came Up With A Way To Warm Up Mars In An Effort To Make It Habitable
In the coming decades, missions to explore Mars will determine whether the Red Planet is fit for human beings to live there someday.
To make it friendlier to life, the conditions on Mars need to resemble those on Earth. The process of making Mars more like Earth is called “terraforming.” Over the past 50 years, many proposals have been made.
In a new study, a team of scientists from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Central Florida has presented a revolutionary approach to transform Mars into a habitable planet.
They came up with a way to warm up Mars’ atmosphere by using nanoscale aerosols of graphene and aluminum.
The findings indicate that engineered aerosol warming is possible, which would be a crucial first step in terraforming the planet. The surface of Mars is about -80 degrees Fahrenheit.
The process of terraforming Mars consists of three steps: warming the atmosphere, thickening the atmosphere, and melting the polar ice caps and permafrost.
As the planet warms, the polar ice caps and permafrost will melt. Liquid water would be released onto the surface of the planet, while water vapor goes into the atmosphere.
The large quantities of dry ice in the ice caps would release additional carbon dioxide, warming the planet even more.
The process would lead to an atmospheric pressure of about 300 millibars, which is 30 percent of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level.
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In these conditions, people would be able to stand outside without wearing a pressure suit, although they would still require warm clothing and oxygen.
Previous proposals for accomplishing the first step toward making Mars habitable called for major technological innovations and resources that currently do not exist.
They range from distributing plants over polar ice caps to add oxygen to the atmosphere, engineering transparent gel tiles to trap heat, or filling the atmosphere with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), ammonia, and methane. There have even been outright fantasies, such as turning one of Mars’ moons into a sun.
The latest proposed method would utilize resources that are already available on Mars. It would take decades to carry out, but it is far more practical and logistically easier than the other plans.
Scientists have learned from rovers like Curiosity that dust on Mars is rich in aluminum and iron. If the dust particles were engineered to have different shapes and compositions, they could trap heat more efficiently and direct sunlight toward the surface of the planet.
“You’d still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” said Edwin Kite, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. “This significantly increases the feasibility of the project.”
The study was published in Science Advances.
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