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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."
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?
Maybe not "heavily insulated", but certainly pressurized. Working "more easily" is still not easy.
Now, if we're talking about a square kilometer of Mars, that'd be a different matter...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The article erroneously claims ASU is in Tucson. The University of Arizona is in Tucson.
Didn't Wornstrom try this in a Futurama episode? Lessons learned I guess.
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.
> Woida points out another potential problem. If not carefully designed, the mirrors could focus harmful high-frequency radiation like gamma rays onto the surface.
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.
"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"
Always looking for a way to make real that Martian rave you've always been planning, eh?
Where were you when the voynix came?
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.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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.)
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Combine this with Kim Stanley Robinson's* deep hole, and you might have a comparatively easily maintained environment on Mars: dig a big, deep hole for much of the atmosphere to fall into, thereby increasing atmospheric pressure; use this array of mirrors suggestion to heat it up, and you've "solved" a couple of the more pressing problems with trying to live on Mars. With sufficient "natural" pressure, heat, and light, building structures in which to grow things becomes easier. This doesn't really address the lack of water, of course...
*I call this Robinson's idea only because Red Mars is where I encountered it - I have no idea who actually came up with it.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
It could be a means of saving life on ours. It's called diversifying your portfolio instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Mars could be a second basket to keep some eggs in. If either goes under, life from the other one can "come back to life a dead planet."
Aside from the difficulties with terraforming Mars mentioned in other comments, I sometimes wonder why there isn't a little more effort put into doing terraforming experiments where land and resources are a little more accessible: earth.
There's plenty of pretty hostile environments here we could start to practice on, but I rarely see anything indicating we're doing much beyond putting good air conditioning units in new houses in Lancaster so we can build layer 60 of suburbia around LA....
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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?
Yes, of course we should start terraforming Mars before we've even really begun to look for existing life there that we'd destroy. Why worry about exterminating an entire planet when there's condos to be built?
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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?
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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.
I wish they could warm New England to 68 degrees instead.
> I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms
> a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere?
There are several problems. Mars does not have enough mass to hold an Earth-like atmosphere, for one thing. The article title is misleading, because it's not really talking about terraforming in the traditional "you can take off your helmet and breathe freely" sense. It's just talking about a measure that would make exploration of the surface, by astronauts in pressure suits, a bit easier.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Another reason why Arnold should become president.
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~~"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The main problem is that they have to be launched first. Although I understand that we are not talking about 5 years here but more like 50 or even 100, but there is this huge anti-nuclear-whatever trend in the world (and I am talking power-plants, research(!), etc.) so that launching any nuclear device into space may be put between the fairy tales at the moment...
However, they definitely used to do it - look at Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 satellites for example - they were equipped with RTG generators. And I think some fairly recent NASA mission too (Cassini?).