Rosetta Probe Reveals Martian Cloud Systems

MattSparkes writes "The ESA's Rosetta probe swooped around Mars on Sunday, completing a key manoeuvre in its 10-year mission to land on a distant comet. The 3-tonne probe came within 155 miles of the planet's surface, and took some incredible images that reveal cloud systems on the planet. "At this time of the Martian year, a large fraction of Mars' atmosphere is evaporating from the southern polar cap and will migrate to the northern polar cap during nothern winter. Over most of the Martian disk one can see large cloud systems.""

Comments

Re:Terraforming won't work

[The Fun Guy]

You'd have to bring a heck of a lot of hydrogen from somewhere else

Reproduce the creation of our own moon by throwing Pluto at Venus. Any off-center hit will plow Pluto's mass of rock and ice into Venus' crust, vaporizing a good chunk of it and imparting a huge spin to the remaining planetary mass. Granted, that's not enough hydrogen yet, but any system capable of moving Pluto should surely be capable of tossing around other substantial icy bodies.

(from where and at what cost?)

Nuclear powered ion thrusters, shooting ionized hydrogen and oxygen from Pluto's surface. If you can get Pluto moving inward in the first place, the sun's gravity will give you a lot of the extra energy you need to get a really good thwack upon impact with Venus. No doubt, this would be a long, difficult, expensive proposition, but not impossible.

_and_ give it a good spin (with what energy and just how?)

See step #1. The energy comes from the acceleration of Pluto dropping into the sun's gravity well.

_and_ somehow start some plate tectonics mechanism to get the convection currents going in the planet and start its dynamo

See step #1. Melting the planet's surface will make it much amenable to taking a spin.

Let the impact blow away most of the atmosphere, and follow the Pluto hit with a chain of large icy bodies. The vaporized crustal material will either fall back into the surface, which will keep churning the surface up, or it will coalesce in orbit to form a moon, and the tidal interactions will do much the same.

get rid of all that carbon in the atmosphere or all the water will just boil off.

Once you have water, it will get locked up in solid carbonates.

No problem.