NASA Plans Mission To Study Martian Atmosphere 61
An anonymous reader writes "Since the atmospheric blanket of Mars is fast disappearing, NASA is planning a mission to Mars in 2013 to study the Red Planet further. The $400-million plus project named the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) will investigate how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. This will be critical in understanding whether there has been life there or not."
Re:You may not know this but... (Score:2, Insightful)
We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.
You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it. Some fairly serious scientists write some of these short stories and put a lot of truly scientific effort into it. One guy who works somewhere in the space-related fields wrote a story detailing how it would be more or less truly impossible to build Mars an atmosphere conducive to human life for reasons related to gravity.
I think we should all be seriously disillusioned about terraforming and all heavy space industry in general. If you'd like a fuller opinion on it, read my essay "Space Travel: Unfit for Humanity". :) http://eyenot.livejournal.com/1009497.html [livejournal.com]
Re:You may not know this but... (Score:3, Insightful)
100 years is nothing of course. If the space race had not been about a dick size contest between two political powers but about real scientific progress those rain makers might have been pumping out gases on mars for almost half of that period by now. To a single person it might seem a daunting proposition to put effort into something which is not going to pay of before he or she is dead or gone but nevertheless this is done time and time again - just ask any middle-aged forest owner if he expects to be around to harvest those saplings he just put so much effort into planting last year.