Scientists lay out revolutionary method to warm Mars

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240807225455.htm

10 Comments

  1. GarunixReborn on

    Thats actually interesting, rhough the low air pressure is a far bigger problem to solve

  2. SpaceMonkeyAttack on

    They say that the effects would reverse after a few years if you stopped emitting particles. So you need a factory running permanently to churn them out. I doubt you could recover more than a tiny percentage back from the atmosphere.

    I wonder if it could work as a bootstrap: warm Mars enough temporarily to allow more permanent measures like melting permafrost?

    I’m not sure I’d want to live on a planet that freezes if the factories stop or run out of raw materials.

  3. J99Pwrangler on

    So why wouldn’t de-obiting a sizable astroid into mars work?

    Comparing IRL to a video game….. but it happens like that in surviving mars. Well the astroids were mostly water as well.

    Interesting tho!

  4. Blazin_Rathalos on

    Interesting technique. Though they mention liquid water as a result of the achieved warming several times. Last time I checked, the boiling point for water is still below its melting point on Mars. Thickening the atmosphere still seems like the more significant and difficult side of the equation. I am not sure how much just things like the sublimating CO2 ice and the evaporating water itself as a result of the achieved warming will add to the atmospheric pressure.

    Edit: if our friendly neighbour wikipedia editors are still up to date, then the frozen CO2 would add up to somewhere between 30-60% of earth sea level atmospheric pressure. So that should be doable for liquid water. But the way, even the lower bound of that estimate is more than enough for “you will need an oxygen tank, but no pressure suit”. The higher bound would be better than Mt Everest base camp.

  5. If terraforming Mars was as simple as heating it up a little bit, it would have already done so itself from previous large asteroid impacts.

    Mars is well beyond the point of no return in this regard.

  6. The same technology could be used on Earth, but with different types of particles specifically made to capture CO2

  7. MeaningfulThoughts on

    Mars has practically no magnetic field. No reason to pump an atmosphere when the sun can strip it away. Mars is dead. Let’s try to save earth which we are completely destroying instead.

  8. I mean we should engineer particles that reflect infrared and use it on earth instead of sulphur.

  9. AncientMarinerCVN65 on

    If we were able to create a breathable atmosphere on Mars, and could walk around on the surface no problem, how much of a danger would solar and cosmic radiation still be? Would living underground and only going outside occasionally be enough to limit our exposure? Or could colonists only live there for a few years before needing to return to Earth (and our awesome magnetosphere)?