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NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable?
spiralx writes: "Scientists at NASA have successfully tested a solar-powered machine that takes carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and produces pure oxygen. It will be tested for real on the next lander to go to Mars, planned for 2003. The article is here at Line One News." Mars will start seeming a little closer as news like this continues.
I think there is a big question here. While I do see the merits of this on a small scale (ie. for a habitat of astronauts on a mission, etc.), there are serious questions about possibly doing this on a large scale.
Eventually, people are going to want to do this to the entire atmosphere of Mars to make it breathable. What will happen then? Should an undertaking like that be considered? Should we totally alter a foreign planet and bring it away from its natural state? What would the result be?
While today this may seem like science fiction (Aliens, Total Recall, etc.), it won't be all that long before this kind of thing becomes a real possibility.
It is a curious but worrysome proposition.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
This device is not on the scale to change a planetary atmosphere. This is mainly something designed for either exploration missions or bases.
Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations, although mass water supplies would be likely required for this type of operation. If machinery was used, it would most likely have to be constructed from local materials and have a vastly larger scale power source than sunlight (which is weaker there.)
You don't want to breathe pure oxygen though. One good spark and your whole habitat is gone. Producing the necessary gases to mix with Oxygen (i.e. Nitrogen, some other noble gases) will be much more difficult than the production of oxygen. It may be possible to get nitrogen by mining the regolith (loose sandy topsoil on Mars).
This strikes me more as a way of producing fuel and water than as a production of breathable air, which could be better done by plants, which would also serve as food source.
One more thing... what use can be made of the carbon byproduct?
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Long ago, before humans roamed the earth, and certainly before they had big telescopes and long-range rocket-powered probes, mars had a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all got baked away. The critical issue for a planet holding an atmosphere is whether or not it has strong enough gravity to hold particles moving at the speed that gas particles travel in their kinetic vibrations. Earth, for example, cannot hold hydrogen or helium gases. If you pop a helium balloon, the helium will eventually drift out of the atmosphere and into outer space.
Fortunately, since O2 molecules are much more massive than He atoms or H2 molecules, the earth can also hold an O2 atmosphere. Mars is also massive enough for this, but there's a problem. Mars is not massive enough to hold oxygen atoms or ions. This is critical because of the UV radiation that the sun emits, which breaks up O2 molecules. On earth, those oxygen ions come together with O2 to form O3 (ozone) which also helps shield the rest of the atmosphere from UV radiation.
Since Mars isn't massive enough to hold oxygen ions, it can't hold them up in the part of the atmosphere where an ozone layer would likely form. Thus, its atmosphere cannot be protected from more radiation, which further ionizes the O2 molecules. This is precisely what happened to the atmosphere on mars, as well as the surface water, and it is what will eventually happen to Mars's polar ice caps. I don't know exactly what the time scale would be for creating a breathable atmosphere, and I don't know how long it would take for it to dissipate, but I think you'd have to be continually working to keep it there, assuming you had the resources to get a planet-wide breathable atmosphere in the first place.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
They're infringing on my patent. I have a working example in my back yard of a much more efficient machine, it is also solar powered, using multiple redundant flexible green solar panels to absorb solar energy, a self-maintainence system that will repair our adapt to compensate for medium scale damage, a robust, flexible physical structure capable of withstanding considerable force by dissipating the energy throughout the structure and bending, and utilises as fuel a small set of chemicals and H20.
It has further advantages over the solar machine exhibited, its components are easily recycled into a number of useful objects, various parts are edible and it aids in topsoil stability. It is also capable of self-reproduction given a requisite amount of available fuel.
It also comes in numerous makes and models suitable for every task, from extremely large to the inconspicuously small.
I call it The Plant, and I would demand royalties on this inferior implementation except that..well..its obviously so inferior no-one would ever buy it.
You can't win a fight.
I remember when I was kid playing the old game SimEarth on my Mac (not the Mac SE or the Mac Classic, but the Mac .. The Mac). Despite the game being very primitive and only in black and white, they had a couple of scenarios that were really interesting. One was to take Mars and make it livable and the other was to take Venus and make it livable. The easiest way to do both was to put in these devices that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen (the hard way was to crash ice comets into the planet, both cooling it off and releasing oxygen .. don't ask me).
.. these sorts of transformations don't happen overnight).
I wouldn't say it's so worrisome. Making other planets livable for humans is going to become a fact of life if we ever decide to permanently leave this world. Mars is another system, but it's a dead system, and adapting it for human needs is not going to make species extinct or ruin our understanding of Martian phenomena (and even if it were alive, we'd have plenty of time to find out
But that's beyond the logistical nightmares of actually getting such a thing to work. Look at how long its taken our planet to register the effects of 150 years of industrial revolution, and the environmental change is a blip, an abnormality barely noticeable on the geological scale that scientists are still debating whether or not we are the cause. You can rest assured that by the time human beings are ready to purposefully alter the state of another planet's environment, they'll have the necessary expertise (and computer/robotics/cybernetic systems) to do it much more exactingly than you or I can imagine.
By the way, in the SimEarth game, the irony of it all is that once you terraform the planet (Mars was easier, Venus was much more difficult), sentient life can rise, become industrialized, and then ruin your environmental masterpiece. Maybe that should be the bigger fear, not what havoc we wreck when we purposefully change the environment, but what terrors we cause when we neglect it.
That way ...
*ducks back into the trenches having stirred up a hornets nest of stereotypes* :)