Warming a Tiny Piece of Mars For Terraforming

dptalia writes "It's been a dream of science fiction writers everywhere that we would eventually terraform Mars. Now an engineering student has proposed a way to terraform only a kilometer of Mars. By building an array of space based mirrors to focus the sun's light, a small area of Mars could be warmed to about 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) which would make it easier for explorers to work and live there. Since Mars' atmosphere is thin, the mirrors would have to be carefully designed to prevent them from reflecting harmful radiation as well as light and warmth."

Comments

Water?

[Jhon]

And the higher temperature would melt any water ice on the ground. This could make precious liquid water available for astronauts to drink, and the water could also be used as a raw material to produce rocket fuel for the journey home, Woida says.

Wouldn't the melted ice boil away at 68 some odd degress on Mars? Or do they plan on heating up a kilometer sized pressurized dome?

The extra warmth would mean the astronauts would not need heavily insulated suits or living quarters, allowing them to work more easily.

Maybe not "heavily insulated", but certainly pressurized. Working "more easily" is still not easy.

Re:Water?

[CRCulver]

One is reminded of the opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars . It takes place in a tent town where the tent is made out of a purely transparent fabric that blocks radiation while still letting light through to make it seem as if folks are living openly on the surface.

But then, what's the point of terraforming a tent town with these mirrors? You could get the same heat and light from a nuclear reactor powering strategically located lamps inside the structure. You can't terraform an open space on the surface, since any atmosphere you'd create would immediately flow into the near-vacuum that is most of the planet. I'm really scratching my head at while this idea is so clever.

Re:Water?

[Daniel_Staal]

It's clever because you don't actualy have to pressurise the surface to live there: a simple bodysuit can give the pressure you need, with SCUBA-style gear to make sure you've got enough oxygen. So if it is warm enough to not require active heating in the suits, you can make a suit thin enough to be worn as part of everyday clothing, which can be worn both inside and out. Then you just put on a helmet with air when you walk outside. Instead of having to put on a full pressure/temperature/air suit everytime you walk through the airlock.

Re:Water?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, what? Why do you think that a space-suit (and it's still one) can be a simple thing just because you need no insulation? The only thing you will get rid of is a bit of insulation and probably you will have to care for cooling instead, because working in a sealed pressure suit without body cooling by transpiration will overheat your body very fast.

This is useless. The whole idea is just silly.

Re:Water?

[CRCulver]

The explorers are going to need power no matter what, and nuclear reactors are the most efficient option, so they're going to be landed anyway.

To prevent harmful radiations

[sillybilly]

To filter out UV and higher frequency things, like our ozone layer does, just use a prizm, or better, a diffraction grating (like a cd), but then you'd end up with a rainbow down on the surface - in some parts everything would be bright red, in some others, bright blue, etc. You'd have to rehomogenize it by sending it through a second prism or diffraction grating, which makes things complicated, especially if a meteor hits and things get misaligned. I guess they should just use TiO2 coatings on mirrors that are transparent in visible but very dark in UV (don't know xray region), to act like a mirror coating ozone layer. But because a lot of UV would be absorbed where rutile coatings are black, it would heat the mirrors a lot, as opposed to purely reflecting mirrors.

Toast

[jbeaupre]

I'd be curious how hot the ground would need to be to warm the tenuous atmosphere continuously blowing over it to a comfortable temperature. And wouldn't you risk creating a huge localized dust storm from the strong convection currents? Maybe you could heat a ring of land around the point you are interested in and just wait until all the dust is blown away ... but I doubt it.

Related

[UbuntuDupe]

Paul Birch has published (in the Journal of the British interplanetary Society) a way to "quickly" terraform all of Mars quickly. (Don't get too mad at me if that article has long since become obsolete.)

Tornado

[jamie]

I know Mars' atmosphere is thin. But wouldn't having a patch of dirt heated 120 deg C warmer than the rest of the planet force the air to rise over that spot, basically forming a permanent tornado?

Re:Tornado

[sillybilly]

A permanent tornado going up a turbine tower installed could be tamed and turned into a neat way to harness solar energy. You can't directly do that down here on Earth, because there are no permanent tornados, but it might be an interesting idea to try to make a permanent tornado somwhere in the middle of the Sahara, with a solar tower collector even. Of course the danger or mirrors getting misaligned and cooking up Cairo or Lagos, or even Rome have to be taken into consideration, and a SCRAM needs to be implemented that without a constant signal received from a station down on sahara saying I'm getting the light okay relative to that sensor out of the circle, the mirrors should go pitch black. I don't think LCD's can withstand space radiation enough to instantly flip off mirroring properties. How do you make a mirror go instantly nonmirror? Is mechanical shutters the simplest answer? A solar-tower coupled greenhouse made of molten mars-rock-glass might actually help in keeping things warm if the central tower is shut, or cool but a lot of energy tapped by allowing the turbines to spin.

scientific error

[bcrowell]

There's at least one scientific error in the article, which is that it talks about the risk of inadvertently focusing gamma rays with a mirror. You can't focus gamma rays with a mirror. A typical gamma, with an energy of 1 MeV, interacts with matter mainly via Compton scattering. At the low-energy end of the gamma spectrum (say 10 keV) it's mostly the photoelectric effect, while at the high end (10 MeV) it's pair production. None of these process obey the law of specular reflection. This would be a more legitimate concern with UV.

I also wondered about the idea of melting water to form lakes on the surface. Mars's atmosphere is so thin that it would be considered a pretty decent vacuum by Earth standards. Won't the water boil off pretty rapidly in a near-vacuum at 30 degrees C?

Putting this idea into good use on Earth

[JimBobJoe]

I've actually been wanting to explore this idea for warming winter temperatures for those of us who live in the Northern Latitudes.

In addition to the general comfort provided by more warmth and sunlight, there is actually a huge environmental benefit. A 20 degree increase in temperatures for a large metro area would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve plenty of fuel that would have been used for heating.

The money spent heating homes and businesses in the north are not insignificant, the last numbers I saw for Ohio indicated that statewide yearly natural gas expenses are about $1.5-$2 billion. (To be fair, you can reduce those costs in other ways as well, but using a solar array to redistribute/magnify solar light during winter has secondary benefits that geothermal heating do not. :-)

Keep in mind, I'd only propose this for the urban areas, and not the rural areas, where I understand agricultural fields might need time to chill during winter.

Plants

[WindBourne]

Now, you can plant various plants. It will be a small selection, but if you can keep the temp above freezing, some plants may accept the lower pressure. Of course, the question is, what happens during the winter? Besides, this may be a lot cheaper than doing a nuke approach. As it is, it could be used to sublimate some of the CO2 at the poles and restart the warming. Of course, it would be better to send a few metorites into the planet.

Re:Gamma radiation!? WTF?

[RobertB-DC]

Woida, if you've got a way to make mylar balloons capable of reflecting gamma rays onto a single focal point, there are some guys in the DoE and the DoD who would like to talk to you, and they pay way better than NASA.

That's what makes me wonder why anyone took this guy seriously in the first place. Fortunately, NASA is only giving him a token amount:

He received $9000 to study the idea from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, US. [...] In his concept study, Woida will work out the structural details of the balloons and study how much extra light from the reflectors reaches the Martian surface.

Nine thousand bucks would buy a lot of ramen, but in this case, it's probably worth it to get the guy to quick knocking on the door at NIAC saying "Hey, look at my space mirror thingie... on MARS!!!!11!!one!`1~~"

Aran Islands

[Anonymous Coward]

We terraform Earth all the time. New Orleans is probably an example of a failed attempt; Holland is certainly sucessful. One of the most interesting "terraform" landscapes I've seen is the Aran Islands of the coast of Ireland. These are giant limestone (I think) slabs in the middle of the ocean. Prevailing winds and rain stripped any top soil away, leaving bare rock. The wind cut the rock into strange sort of brick shapes, leaving loose rock tens of feet deep. Then 4000 years ago some Celt gets the bright idea that it'd be a nice place to live. He takes all the natural bricks, builds thousands of kilometers of walls. These form natural wind breaks. Then he mixes seaweed with what passes for sand out out there and invents artificial soil and covers the island. Suddenly what used to be a barran lump of rock is capable of supporting human life. very cool.