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Mars Science Technology

Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars, New Research Says (discovermagazine.com) 281

Posted by msmash from the change-of-plans dept.
Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home -- even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole. From a report: Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy puts a kibosh on the idea of terraforming Mars. At the heart of the study is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is abundant on Mars -- its thin atmosphere is made of the stuff, and the white stuff we often see on the surface is dry ice, not snow. CO2 is even trapped in the rocks and soil. That abundance has long fueled visions of a fantasy future where all that trapped carbon dioxide is released, creating a thicker atmosphere that warms the planet. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has even proposed nuking Mars to make this happen.

But in this new study, veteran Mars expert Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards of Northern Arizona University, surveyed how much carbon dioxide is available for terraforming the Red Planet. They combined Martian CO2 observations from various missions -- NASA's MAVEN atmospheric probe, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, as well as NASA's Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results throw shade on the dreams of futurists.
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Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars, New Research Says More

Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars, New Research Says

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  • They think small (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @01:55PM (#57034816)

    A few cometary impacts would change their numbers right quick. Equilibrium may be awhile, but still...

    • Re: They think small (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @02:01PM (#57034860) Homepage Journal

      You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yeah great idea, just "move Venus into Mars orbit" - you fucking space-genius.

      • Re: They think small (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MiniMike ( 234881 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @03:17PM (#57035414)

        Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.

        If we had that level of technology, it would make more sense to move them to Earth orbit (in opposition to Earth, of course) and make a second Earth/Moon pair. A quick calculation shows that if we leave a safety margin of 10x the Moons orbit around each pair, we could fit 18 Earth/Moon pairs in the current Earth orbit. Jupiter is 318 times the mass of Earth and could provide what's needed (again, assuming sufficient technology). Could probably adjust the size/orbit of the new moons, or do something crazy like Earth/Earth pairs to fit more in, but that would probably mess with tides and make them less habitable. With the previously mentioned technology we could also fix the effects of these changes on the remaining plants.

        Dibs on designing the Fjords...

      • Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.

        Sure. Build a Dyson sphere, while you are at it. The engineering of terraforming Mars is way beyond our current capabilities. The engineering of moving Venus to the Mars orbit is exponentially way beyond our current capabilities.

        • The engineering of terraforming Mars is way beyond our current capabilities.
          Actually: no.

          https://www.universetoday.com/... [universetoday.com]

        • I think terraforming is easier than most people think. I propose a test to settle this. Seed the atmosphere and soil of Mars with a smorgasbord of microorganisms and resilient colony organisms, everything from archaea to zooplankton. Let simmer for a few hundred thousand years.

          I betcha some of them take root and form the base of the food chain.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          Not really, on both accounts. We already have the basic capacity to start terraforming Mars. The rest would be a learn as we go process. Now whether it would worth terraforming Mars, to me, is another question.

          As for moving Venus, or any planet, that two is not beyond our current capacity. Granted its a daunting process but given time we could do it. Here is something to think about. We have already altered the orbits of every major body in the solar system with the possible exception of the sun.

      • You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.

        After some quick googling:

        Mars is about 1/10 the mass of Earth.

        Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta total about 1% of Mars' mass. Crashing them into the planet wouldn't be enough.

        Deimos and Phobos and Halley's comet are each a couple/several orders of magnitude smaller, you would need hundreds or thousands of these to get the same effect as Ceres.

        The total mass of Saturn's rings is about 1% of the mass needed.

        The mass of Ganymeade, Callisto, Europa, and Io (moons of Jupiter) are about 30% the mass needed.

        It looks

        • Mars has no magnetic field, not because it is not iron rich, but because the iron core is solid, unlike the molten earth core.

          Mars can easily a human breathable atmosphere for several million years.

        • It looks like there is no reasonable way to increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to get a reasonable atmosphere.

          How did you arrive at this conclusion? You'd get very dense atmosphere even after dropping only a fraction of the mass you've enumerated onto the surface of Mars, since a large fraction of those bodies are volatiles.

        • You don't need Earth plants to grow on Mars. You need Mars plants that live happily on Mars. For that you need to start small and let the bigger pieces self-assemble. Seed that bitch with all sorts of little shit that digests inorganic matter and shits organic matter. If we can get to free living simple macroscopic organisms that are able to thrive in low light/low temperature/minimal atmosphere conditions of Mars we can splice up from there, adding for edibility or for the characteristics necessary to

      • Terra/Luna.

        Found the pretentious twat!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      "A few" would amount to "about any Carbonacerous asteroid we know of in the Asteroid Belt". Compared with a planet, the mass of all asteroids taken together is miniscule (it's about 5% the mass of the Moon or .5% the mass of Mars). For terraforming, only the asteroids of spectral class C (Carbonaceous asteroids) are of any interest, and albeit they make up about 75% of all objects in the Asteroid belt, they are rather small, and only about 3% of their mass is Carbon. The largest one, (10) Hygiea, may contai
    • You might not need impacts. Just bring blocks of ice and frozen gases into the orbit and have them evaporate. At low temperatures, they mostly won't have escape velocity and will neatly integrate into the atmosphere.

  • Welp (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Instead of nuking Mars, send CO2 rich asteroids at it to serve as both the nuke and the additional nutrient.
    The simple stupid solutions are sometimes the best solutions. If it doesn't work it doesn't change a thing, if it works it changes a lot.

    • I would imagine that if we could reliably reach the asteroid belt, AND locate CO2-rich asteroids, AND move them on an intercept course to Mars, then the challenge of terraforming sans asteroids probably won't be that big anyway...
    • Why not just run a hose from Earth to Mars and pump out our excess CO2? Win-win!

      • Why not just run a hose from Earth to Mars and pump out our excess CO2? Win-win!

        Good idea, now draw us a sketch of the pressure seal.

      • Venus might be a better idea for that, actually. But even better are probably outer solar system bodies where you're likely to find lots of dry ice.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          I've always thought Venus was a better choice than Mars. It has the one thing that Mars will never have, mass. An from some of the radar data we got back Magellan it probably still has a molten core. Scrubbing the atmosphere, cracking the crust to start plate tectonics, and adding water to create oceans are all daunting tasks but are doable. Even adding a moon to stabilize the planet can be done.

          The biggest issue would be altering the rotation of the planet. Which also can be done, look up a dyson m

    • I don't think you understand how much CO2 but also Oxygen and Nitrogen is necessary to make Mars remotely resemble earth. Mars' atmosphere is being continuously stripped by solar wind too due to lack of magnetic fields.

      Terraforming Mars is impossible.

      • "continually" doesn't tell us the rate, or establish that there would be a problem. Every single space suit ever used in space, continually leaks.

        You need to know how much atmosphere needs to be added to get to the desired state, and then calculate the rate of loss and how much needs to be added in order to prevent it being stripped away after [some amount of time you would calculate].

        Until you have that, it is just hand-waving about the Universe not being perfect. Also, you could have started with the word

      • Mars' atmosphere is being continuously stripped by solar wind too due to lack of magnetic fields.

        ...at around 100 grams per second. [nasa.gov] That's replacable by a cube of frozen material with a side of around 15 meters delivered every year from the outer solar system.

    • Instead of nuking Mars, send CO2 rich asteroids at it to serve as both the nuke and the additional nutrient.

      Water is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and Mars needs more water anyhow.

      So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the -atmosphere orbits to heat and humidify the atmosphere, add oxygen (from some of the water that gets split and doesn't recombine in time), and also add whatever impurities they contain.

      Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to

      • So nudge some icy comets and asteroids into burn-up-in-the-atmosphere orbits ... Heating the atmosphere should bring out any frozen carbon dioxide without having to mine it.

        Or if you're in a hurry for some of the mineral CO2 you do have, land an iceball on it. (Strip-mining on a planetary scale. Much easier than digging.)

        But a small one, so you don't lose a couple years of ground-level solar heating waiting for the dust to settle.

        • Or if you're in a hurry for some of the mineral CO2 you do have, land an iceball on it. (Strip-mining on a planetary scale...)

          How's THAT for "environmental impact"? B-)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      I like this. One thing we can say from our history is we are damn good at bashing rocks together.

  • Well, yeah. (Score:5, Informative)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @02:01PM (#57034854)

    Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.

    You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.

    Mars is not really a backup for earth, at least not if you don't have a large fraction of a million years to get it to that point. If you think that enough technology can get you there quicker - then cool, use that on Earth. There's no almost scenario where it would be easier to fix Mars than fix Earth.

    Heck, it would be far easier to fix life to not need Earth than make Mars support our life as-is.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 )

      And yet Titan, which is smaller than Mars, manages to hold onto an atmosphere thicker than Earth's.

      • Re:Well, yeah. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Punchcardz ( 598335 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @02:38PM (#57035152)
        Titan gets to poach off the magnetosphere of a little thing called Saturn. Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure. Mars is a shitty place to live, and has fundamental attributes that will continue to make it a shitty place to live. If you have self-sufficient, hermetically sealed habs for a Mars settlement, you are much better off sticking them in Barstow CA. At least then you can still get Amazon Prime.

        • And neither does Titan have any magnetic field of its own. Since it must be relying totally on Saturn's field, how strong and how nearby an external field would Mars need to retain a usable atmosphere? "Usable" need not mean a full Earth of 1000 millibars. You could get away with 210 mb of oxygen, or intermediate inert gas mixture thereof.

          • And neither does Titan have any magnetic field of its own. Since it must be relying totally on Saturn's field, how strong and how nearby an external field would Mars need to retain a usable atmosphere?

            Stronger than Deimos, Phobos and anything that we could feasibly build would provide.

        • Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind.

          In geologic time. With the moon, if you added an atmosphere it would last just fine for millenia before you had to pump it up a bit to make up for the loss. Mars has a much deeper gravity well, so an added atmosphere should last a lot longer..

          (As for "poaching" off the Earth's field, the moon is out of it except for about 6 days a month - during which it gets some substantial electrical effects that are likely to strip more gas than t

        • You can stay in Oakland/San Jose, and some of us will go to Mars.
          Given the choice of Amazon Prime vs the waiting new discoveries all over Mars, I would take the later.

        • Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure.

          How about, a giant umbrella to block the solar wind, and then some big mirrors hanging off the edge to direct visible light towards the middle?

          Blocking solar wind with a giant elecromagnet is not exactly efficient. If you're stuck with round blobs of random crap, sure, that's the only game in town, but if you're engineering something it seems a silly place to start.

    • Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.

      You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.

      Mars is not really a backup for earth, at least not if you don't have a large fraction of a million years to get it to that point. If you think that enough technology can get you there quicker - then cool, use that on Earth. There's no almost scenario where it would be easier to fix Mars than fix Earth.

      Heck, it would be far easier to fix life to not need Earth than make Mars support our life as-is.

      Ryan Fenton

      Um.. IN a few billion years our sun will become a LOT larger than it is now... At that point it will envelop the earth totally. We might want to carefully consider how we can get something habitable out there... We obviously have time, but earth will not be a habitable planet at some point, either by our doing, or nature's.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        We? We won't be humans in a few million years, let alone billion? It's even more remote from us than ancient fish saying they need to get out of the sea and onto land.
    • Not a problem! Look, Musk is all over it... First, we send a bunch of SolarCity installs to Mars, followed by Powerwalls to provide power during the dark time. Then a big coil of wire around the equator of the planet, and - BAM! - instant magnetic field!

      • Not a problem! Look, Musk is all over it... First, we send a bunch of SolarCity installs to Mars, followed by Powerwalls to provide power during the dark time. Then a big coil of wire around the equator of the planet, and - BAM! - instant magnetic field!

        It's even easier than that! We skip the batteries and just make sure to install solar panels on both sides of the planet - hey, we're wrapping that wire around it anyway, right?

    • Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.

      0.1 kg/s is not exactly a breakneck speed of gas loss.

      You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.

      Seriously? Just the water inside Ceres would cover Mars with around 1.4 km layer of oceans. Not to mention all the other bodies in the solar system with lots of water ice, dry ice, nitrogen ice etc.

  • CO2 only (Score:4, Informative)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @02:06PM (#57034898) Homepage
    So this study looks primarily at CO2 naturally available for terraforming. But there are a lot of things we can synthesize which are even more powerful greenhouse gases. Sulfur hexafluoride is a fun example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride [wikipedia.org] with an effective warming potential a little over 20,000 times that of CO2. It is also essentially non-toxic (aside from its annoying density in large quantities). Sulfur hexalfuoride isn't the only such example, so it is still very plausible that we could terraform Mars. What this does mean though is that a simple straight high CO2 atmosphere is very likely going to be insufficient unless there are major undiscovered reserves of CO2 somewhere on Mars (which right now seems unlikely).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mbkennel ( 97636 )
      A much higher greenhouse effect will help with temperature, but not enough for pressure. Moon has good enough temperature on its own being the same distance from Sun as Earth.

    • (aside from its annoying density in large quantities)

      In what way does the density change in large quantities? Are you suggesting it would result in spontaneous nuclear fission, or fusion, or something?

  • Somewhere I read that Mars lost its atmosphere because it didn't have a magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blasting its atmosphere away, and, if we tried to build up an atmosphere again, the same thing would happen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      Read TFA! Of course the terraforming plan includes 2 giant electromagnets, one on each pole. Problem solved!

    • Yes and no.
      If we could magically set up an atmosphere over night, it would last for millions of years.
      There are ideas how to place a magnetic field generator between the planet and the sun, so the radiation (particles) get deflected by a simple to set up field.

    • yeah, over a million years to strip it .
  • Mars, Gityer Asstu

  • There's more than enough water and air to set up systems to live there.

    You just won't get a Princess of Barsoom situation.

  • I always wondered in Mars terraforming plans: There seemed to be enough carbon dioxide on Mars. There seemed to be enough water. There still might be enough oxygen if you refine the iron out of all the dust. But what about nitrogen? It's 70% of our atmosphere, but I don't know of any other source of it in the solar system. I guess if you were desperate you could scrape some helium out of Jupiter and send it to Mars, to prevent a near-pure-oxygen atmosphere catching things on fire. But that still would

    • The N2 for mars would come from exactly the same source as what Earths did. Ammonia and methane was on early asteroids. Loads of asteroids past jupiter esp. in the kuiper belt, is nothing but Ammonia, Methane, and a few other liquids that are frozen together.
      With a nuke engine, we can get out to these asteroids, attach an engine to these and use a small amount of the asteroid to serve as propellant, and then crash it into Mars. Add some plants, and ammonia will be reduce from 2 NH3 to N2 / 3 H2, all whil
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • sigh.
      Lots say that we simply choose to go with CO2 and raise the pressure to .12 atm, which is double what mars is at. That would be around 15,000 m on earth or half again as high as K2. That is still within the armstrong limits (.6 atm), which means that we can be outside with lightweight suits, but, will need simple O2 for breathing. Now, if we do that, how long will it take to strip this back down to .6 atm of today's mars atmosphere? 2000-4000 years. IOW, as far back as when christ was on the planet,

  • Venus has always been a better target (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Monday July 30, 2018 @02:45PM (#57035206)
    At the correct altitude in the Venusian atmosphere you can have earth like temperature and pressure. You don't need 5m of concrete to protect you from the solar winds and you have all the ingredients to build everything you want there. You just can't stand on the surface today. If your colony is willing to float in huge balloons though then things are much much easier than Mars.

    • Venus has many of the components needed but less of the adventure that Mars offers. As a compromise, I suggest harvesting, cooling and shooting lots of CO2 from Venus to Mars. Ideally you would want to automate this process. At the same time you need to start collecting all the iron from the Martian surface to eventually put back in the core. The core may need help getting started but once there is a CO2 atmosphere in place, it should feedback more heat, fully melt and start generating a magnetic field

      • I simply don't get why people like you, no offense, have no natural feeling how mindboggeling huge the amount of gas is, you need to transfer from Venus to Mars and how mindboggeling many crafts you would need to make that in a reasonable time span (1000 years?) and how absolutely absurd the energy requirements for that would be.

        • I simply don't get why people like you, no offense, have no natural feeling how mindboggeling huge the amount of gas is

          No, it's simply that people like me don't have a myopic view of what is possible. Sadly people like you seem to limit yourselves to ideas that can be accomplished in your own tiny lifespans. Just because it may take hundreds of years to complete doesn't mean it's not worth starting.

    • That level is loaded with sulfuric acid and IIRC, several other nasty elements.
      The other issue is the radiation. There is no magnetosphere. As such, heavy radiation from the sun. OTOH, if you can stay on the backside of venus, OR can create a local magnetosphere (lots of energy), then it is possible to survive.

      With that said, I am amazed that we have not put a number of 'sats', or buoys might be a better term, into venus' atmosphere. It really is a good idea.

  • There are lots of cometary objects, with lighter materials like that, out past the known planets. Only a few come past here, but maybe that is enough.

    No, we could never do that, just like you could never have a phone that you could carry out on the beach that would reach the whole world!

    On the other hand, maybe we don't want to waste the stuff we will need for the orbital habitats. And maybe later for a Dyson sphere...

  • Seriously, if we are going to terraform, it was never about using just the CO2 at mars.
    Instead, we will have to import various elements from asteroids. In particular, there are ice asteroids past Jupiter that contain a great deal of ammonia and methane. Both of these molecules are EXACTLY what are needed. Simply crash these into mars.
    Both of these are strong GHG. Interestingly, the Ammonia will break down over time into H2/N2. However, it would break down faster with plants on mars.

  • ... we have too many terrorists on Earth, supported by poppies and shit.

    Why would we set them up on Mars and provide land for terror farming?

    Why?

  • Define "terraforming" exactly? After we place an initial colonial foothold anywhere else in the solar system, we will make whatever short-term modifications of the environment may be feasible to make living there easier. No matter what changes we make, there will be no more interest in totally recreating the Earth environment any more than we made New Jersey an exact copy of Italy.

    In the long run, we will change ourselves through genetic engineering to met our new environments - all of them - partway. Mars-

  • ...we should take care to start a planetary magnetic field. Without it, every attempt to colonize Mars is doomed to failure. Radiations will hit the martian soil, damaging living beings, and disturbing the chemistry of the atmosphere in a very unpredictable way. In general, planets with no tectonics activities (i.e. volcanoes, quakes, etc.) are not suited for hosting life on the long run.

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