Slashdot Mirror
NASA Proposes a Magnetic Shield To Protect Mars' Atmosphere (phys.org)
New submitter Baron_Yam writes: Apparently it is no longer necessarily science fiction to consider terraforming the red planet in a human lifetime. NASA scientists have proposed putting a magnetic shield at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point, diverting sufficient solar wind in hopes that the Martian atmosphere would thicken and heat the planet to the point of melting the ice caps, causing what remains of Martian water to pool on the surface. While not enough of a change to allow walking around without a space suit, this would make human exploration of the planet a much easier task.
It sounds a lot like wishful thinking and hand-waving.
It probably is, at that. In my (limited) experience, phys.org tends to publish stories rich in big, glossy pictures, slightly sensationalising headlines and with a rather too "popular" (read: dumbed down) style. Maybe I'm being unfair, but I don't think their stories tend to qualify as real news, when most of it is a glossy writeup of things I have already seen elsewhere, on general news media like the BBC.
I think this is a fundamental problem when popularising science news - when you look at the totality of science, and especially the amazing discoveries made in the first half of the 20th century, it really is quite mind-blowing, but unfortunately this does not reflect the day-to-day reality of most science. Which is why most attempts at making science news popular and exciting are doomed to be disappointing.
As for the actual idea - I think it is well-established that a magnetic shield would be just the thing to protect the atmosphere of a planet (or the passengers of a spacecraft), but the technical challenges are enormous, and the benefits to Mars would probably be slow and rather minor. At this point it is mostly speculation, but of course, all the great things we now take for granted once were little more than dreams and handwaving, so who knows? Perhaps we find a way to produce a magnetic fields big and strong enough that would endure long enough with little maintenance, and perhaps we find a way to replenish Mars' atmostphere quickly enough to make it worth doing.
There's a lot of 'Mars stuff' I'm surprised we don't toy with more. Or maybe we are, but it's all in some lab because (so far) that's good enough given our current level of technology and knowledge.
You'd think, for instance, somewhere someone should be experimenting with the minimum requirements for rendering Martian regolith into non-toxic, fertile ground. Toying around with the power requirements to augment Martian sunlight and temperatures to levels required to support Terran plants or trying to engineer plants that will grow and thrive at Martian insolation levels. Figuring out how to reliably supply the required power.
Or playing around with in situ production of building materials, automated mining and refining equipment, etc. Maybe we just don't have a firm enough grasp on what the Martian surface is actually like to bother starting with that. Send a robot to make a little red brick igloo, you know?
I'd certainly be up for a really inhumane experiment - sending a colony of mice in a sealed environment to see multiple generations of mammals under 0.38g. And it might be nice to attempt a small terrarium with some automated environmental systems to see how long we can keep it going. And while we're at that... drop a scale model of an airlock and cycle it until it fails so we can see how bad the dust problem is.