NASA Proposes Warming Mars

hotsauce writes "The Guardian reports a NASA scientist has proposed releasing a gas on Mars to start a global warming of the planet in order to make it more hospitable for life. No word on how much traction this has amongst geophysicists. I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet."

Comments

Stupidest thing ever

[Mark_MF-WN]

This is the stupidest thing I've heard. And from a NASA scientist no less.

Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?

How are we supposed to get it to stay there on Mars? If Mars could successfully hold an atmosphere, wouldn't it still have one? I was under the impression that Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field allowed radiation to strip away any gases on Mars' surface.

Re:Stupidest thing ever

[Dipster]

Mars' gravity is perfectly capable of holding a thick atmoshpere. If you look at Venus, who's gravity is something like 98% of Earth's, it has an atmosphere 100 times thicker than ours. The thickness is determined by a lot of factors, but gravity is a relitivaly small one.

The magnetic field argument is a strong one. Its the only thing that protects the atmosphere from being blown away. However, another theory on why Mars lost its atmosphere is the following:

As rain falls through the atmosphere, CO2 dissolves in it. When this rain water hits the ground, the CO2 reacts with Calcium and others to form limestone. On earth, this limestone is eventually recycled through our tectonic processes and released in volcanos/other release points (this being part of the global warming argument that something like 70% of earths CO2 is released by volcanos and is outside our control).

However, on Mars, any tectonic activity has stopped, and as such, this limestone never gets put back into the atmosphere. It's ironic that the water itself eliminated the gas it needed to exist.

One could say its a little of both. When tectonic processes stopped, CO2 stopped being recycled leading to a slightly thinner and much colder atmosphere, at the same time that the magnetic field dissappeared and the remainder of the atmospere was blown away.

Planetary Engineering Bibliography

[IO ERROR]

http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/cfm/terrabib.ht ml contains references to nearly 100 books, articles, papers, etc., on terraforming.

babysteps first guys...

[WiFireWire]

Why is NASA so gung-ho about going to mars so quickly? Why not return to the moon so we can learn how to sustain our peeps closer to home?

Re:Pipe Dream

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess thats why Venus' atmosphere is so tiny, its lack of magnetic field never allowed it to have one. Oh wait, it has an atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than Earth's, and all without a magnetic field.

Re:No !

[darkmeridian]

Well, you do not know if there's life unless and until you do research. What if you jump the gun and change Mars before you complete all research?

Furthermore, there is research that could reveal the genesis of our solar system, planet, or universe up there on Mars. We should preserve it until we are sure that we need the planet populated or that we have exhausted all scientific exploration of Mars.

Re:Original NASA Article from Feb/2001 with more i

[Rei]

A much more difficult task than terraforming Mars, conceptually, is terraforming Venus.

Sci-fi authors have often implemented plot devices such as impacting ice-laden comets or moons into Venus to cool it, supply water, and spin it up; however this is fundamentally flawed, as the problem the amount of CO2. Furthermore, impacting a comet or moon will impart more energy than it would soak up. Now, perhaps with a large enough impact you could blast away part of Venus's atmosphere; however, this would need to be a very significant impact. Hypothetically, a large near-impacting body that skims Venus's atmosphere repeatedly might be able to take some atmosphere with it on each pass; however, it seems unlikely that you could ablate enough atmosphere in this manner while using a body small enough to control.

Sagan proposed the use of microbes in the atmosphere to absorb the CO2 and precipitate it out, but this suffers from one big fundamental problem: life as we know it requires CHONP, and there's no significant quantities of phosphorus in Venus's atmosphere. Perhaps a simpler form of "life" or nanomachine - even if not self-replicating, but simply mass produced on Earth - could use solar energy to convert CO2 to solid compounds.

In theory, if Venus could be driven into a very elliptical orbit (causing close passes to the sun), the sun would blow off most of its atmosphere. Or, if Venus could be given an extremely fast rate of rotation, the atmosphere could be made to expand to the point where the solar wind can blow it off easily. However, apart from the length of time for the sun to remove the atmosphere, both of these require imparting incredible amounts of energy to the planet.

Another concept has been to use gigantic sunshades to block sunlight approaching the planet; however, planet-sized shades seem a bit far-fetched to build. An alternative that I've seen would be to use gigantic mirrors to focus solar energy on a small part of the upper atmosphere and use the light pressure to encourage particles to reach escape velocity; whether or not this is realistic, I don't know.

Re:Tinkering

[loucura!]

If we mess up, then we'll have learned a lesson which can be used next time. There's no way to learn how to go about messing with a planet's atmosphere without... messing with the atmosphere! Think ahead: If we can't live there when we need it, we can always mine it for resources.