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Mars Earth Space Science

Scientists Could Use Aerogel Sheets To Make Mars Surface Fit For Farming (theguardian.com) 176

Posted by BeauHD from the fertile-oases dept.
Scientists believe aerogel sheets could transform the cold, arid surface of Mars into land fit for farming. The Guardian reports: The "aerogel" sheets work by mimicking Earth's greenhouse effect, where energy from the sun is trapped on the planet by carbon dioxide and other gases. Spread out in the right places on Mars, the sheets would warm the ground and melt enough subsurface ice to keep plants alive. Should humans ever decide to spread beyond Earth, as the late Stephen Hawking declared we must, then growing food on alien worlds will be a skill that has to be mastered. But on Mars the conditions are hardly conducive. The planet is frigid and dry and bombarded by radiation, the soil contains potentially toxic chemicals and the wispy atmosphere is low on nitrogen.

The aerogel sheets do not solve all of the problems but they could help future spacefarers create fertile oases on desolate planets where plants and other photosynthesizing organisms can take root. Because life would only grow beneath the sheets, the risk of contaminating the rest of Mars with foreign lifeforms would be minimal. The aerogel used to make the sheets is composed 97% of air, with the rest made up of a light silica network. The researchers, including scientists at Nasa and the University of Edinburgh, showed that 2cm- to 3cm-thick sheets of silica aerogel blocked harmful UV rays, allowed visible light through for photosynthesis and trapped enough heat to melt frozen water locked in Martian soil. The sheets could be laid directly on the ground to grow algae and aquatic plants, or suspended to provide room for land plants to grow beneath them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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Scientists Could Use Aerogel Sheets To Make Mars Surface Fit For Farming More

Scientists Could Use Aerogel Sheets To Make Mars Surface Fit For Farming

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  • Aerogel...good luck with that! (Score:5, Informative)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:11AM (#58932560)
    The stuff is super expensive, very hard to make in quantity, extremely fragile and bulky. At this moment a 2.5 cm x 2.5 cm x 1.0 cm chunk of it will set you back $60 USD. We'll put a human on Mars long before we'll be able to make structures out of 3cm sheets of aerojet on Mars.

    • Nonsensical pricing. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The market is rather small. But it is not that hard to make. I made some myself, with passable quality, at our local fablab.

      And if you specifically manufacture a rocket and whole base, I'm pretty sure the pricing for an aerogel maker won't matter.

    • Re: Aerogel...good luck with that! (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Its being made stupidly. It can be made with foamed methylcelluose impregnated with hygroscopic materials, nutrients, inactive soil bacteria, growth media,etc as trapped micropores or gasses.

      • Re: Aerogel...good luck with that! (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Also it doesn't really matter how its made. In capitalism the price of things is what people are willing to pay and what people are willing to sell for. So the cost of production is just a floor for what people are willing to sell a product for. If there were an efficient market maybe, but I guarantee the market for aerogel is inefficient.

        One comparison I tend to use is the complexity of processors. No other commonly bought object is as complex as a modern processor. The complexity is unfathomable. The cost

        • Microprocessors are by far the single most complicated thing humanity has ever made. And they are commodities. Its a great demonstration of what markets can do. No matter what the product is, if you can commoditize it, you can manage to make it on a massive scale cheaply.

          • it's also a great demonstration that processing information has nothing to do with the material world
            progress in one field doesn't map 1:1 to any other field

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Mars in itself is not that useful but it is extremely good practice for doing colonisation light years away and a more suitable planet. More of a long term trade depot and operations hub, less risk with contamination than the earth and more resources than the moon.

      By the time we are capable of putting the resources into terra forming Mars those resources would likely be put to far better use terra forming and colonising a more suitable planet around another star but the practice is most definitely needed,

      • it is extremely good practice for doing colonisation light years away and a more suitable planet

        If the conditions are not comparable anyway, just do the experiment on Earth. Pick an inhospitable area, fence a section off, kill anything that's alive, pack a few trucks full of supplies, and go live there without any further help.

        • Exactly. That is what I tell all the space nutters: TRY IT OUT HERE FIRST. They talk about building space factories around Mars. I say: try building ONE around EARTH first. Want to try out your new aerogel idea? Try it out in the Gobi desert first. Even then it is 1000x easier than doing it on Mars.

          • What do you suggest that they try? The manufacturing equipment? That will be in a pressurized module, so there's virtually no difference. Using the aerogel sheets on surface? That makes no sense since Gobi is not Martian permafrost for this to test anything useful.
          • Even in the depths of the Gobi winter at -30degC, the Gobi will be considerably warmer than a Martian night. It's not a very good comparison.

            The whole terraforming Mars thing is a stupid idea. Yes, we'll rapidly have many humans living off-Earth, but the number living on Mars will never be greater than those living in the Gobi. There's no benefit to it, in comparison to building human habitations out of ground-up asteroids.

      • Um, how would you colonize a planet that is light years away??? You do know what a "light year" means, right?

        • Um, how would you colonize a planet that is light years away??? You do know what a "light year" means, right?

          It's like when you make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.

        • Uh...fewer calories than a regular year?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Falos ( 2905315 )

          dark year minus goatee

        • Um, how would you colonize a planet that is light years away???

          Well if you want a "road map",

          Step 1 - send the robots to build an industrial and chemical industry and map the asteroids of the target system.
          Step 2 (can be in flight while step 1 is in work) - send microbe and human DNA codes.
          Step 3 - your industrial and chemical base builds DNA-printing machines (present-day technology) and the necessary proteins to kick-start life (people are experimenting with this already) as microbes.
          Step 4 - start to

      • Mars in itself is not that useful but it is extremely good practice for doing colonisation light years away and a more suitable planet. More of a long term trade depot and operations hub, less risk with contamination than the earth and more resources than the moon.

        By the time we are capable of putting the resources into terra forming Mars those resources would likely be put to far better use terra forming and colonising a more suitable planet around another star but the practice is most definitely needed, as is the interplanetary logistic and operations hub. Biological mistakes can be made and fixed on Mars but not on the earth.

        We are a loooong way away from settling planets light years away. There is zero room for error for making a self-sustaining biosystem when you're travelling outside the solar system. It will take a generation or two of practice somewhere much nearer before we could feel comfortable doing that. Put a colony on mars first, and once we've successfully kept it alive for 50 years re-evaluate what it would take to send something light years away. Who knows what technology we will have in 70 years from now (th

        • Generation or two? How are you planning on traveling to a planet light years away???? I never understand Space Nutters.

        • There is zero room for error for making a self-sustaining biosystem when you're travelling outside the solar system.

          Then don't do that. Send the equipment and information for building an industry, then send the information for building people (and any other animals that you want - lice, wheat, whatever) using your industry, then get your machinery to build people. And lice, wheat or whatever. Send multiple copies of the information so you can do error correction before building the organisms.

          Unless you bel

      • >By the time we are capable of putting the resources into terra forming Mars those resources would likely be put to far better use terra forming and colonising a more suitable planet around another star

        Not unless it turns out that FTL travel is actually possible it won't . Even if we do colonize a planet around another star, that planet will never be able to exchange goods and services with our solar system - it will never provide anything of value to Earth except for information (i.e. xeno-research and

    • The stuff is super expensive, very hard to make in quantity, extremely fragile and bulky.

      You can say that about basically any product when we first start making it. Seriously, we're just learning how to really produce the stuff and figuring out what it's good for. It's going to take a minute to work out how best to produce it in volume for reasonable sums.

      Now whether it is actually useful for the purpose stated in the article is another question. There are a lot of technical and economic issues to work out first. Right now it is little more than a theoretical musing with little actual resea

      • I think you're wrong about it taking decades. But I think you are right we will be able to make stuff before we get boots on ground. And that's simply because you don't want to send anyone there if they don't have the tools to fix something when it breaks. Some level of manufacturing will be necessary. Musk is talking about ISRU which technically is anyway. Its fuel production.

      • Seriously, we're just learning how to really produce the stuff

        Aerogel was first created by Samuel Stephens Kistler in 1931.... Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s... [wikipedia.org]

        Oh, yes. Like macintosh computers, DVDs, nokia cell phones, Sony camcorders, and kodak disposable cameras, aerogels are brand new things that we're just learning to make. (And the first ones were made shortly after cars and electricity became new technology.)

        Seriously, we're 30 years past the development of carbon aerogels. If we haven't figured out how to industrialize the process yet,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yet, the only think this story does is get some people some press exposure. But the idea itself is pretty much worthless at this time.

    • The stuff is super expensive, very hard to make in quantity

      Oddly enough, this was true of aluminum back in the 19th century when it was first refined. It took about 60 years from first attempts to refine to actually doing so. And even then it was worth more than gold....

      And I expect that aerogel will go through a similar period (really expensive and hard to make in quantity) before it becomes as cheap as dirt....

    • The expense of space flight is getting that kilo out of this gravity well, the raw materials cost is small portion of the overall cost. The material that is used will be the most cost efficient by weight.

    • Or you could buy more than a yard of it for $59 at Walmart. Aerogel Insulating mat [walmart.com]

      • Or you could buy more than a yard of it for $59 at Walmart. Aerogel Insulating mat [walmart.com]

        Except it's not really the same material. It's not even close. There are lots of materials described as aerogel but the article being discussed references a specific form of aerogel that is nothing like the commonly available aerogel mats used for insulation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jack9 ( 11421 )

      The idea of living on the surface, is a bad joke that the public (and some scientists) haven't gotten yet. Without extensive genetic engineered changes, Earth-Martian transplants will live underground, maybe with some very thick, radiation resistant, dimming skylights, if you're lucky.

  • Overengineered? (Score:3)

    by xonen ( 774419 ) on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:36AM (#58932624) Journal

    Chances are a film of polyethylene or sheets of bubble wrap would have the same effect, maybe apart the UV filtering.

    I guess the good part about this research is that they done the math and concluded it's possible with 'passive' materials.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Yeah, I love the fact that they've basically invented a greenhouse ("Insulative transparent material elevated over the ground!") and think that it's a breakthrough. ;)

      Regardless, even if you block no light, sunlight on Mars is low to begin with, and drops precipitously for weeks at a time under major dust storms. Not a good place to be a plant of any kind, let alone one that humans want to produce calories for them.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 1) Melt ice in mars almost-vacuum atmosphere and the water will immediately explosively boil away
      2) UV as others have mentioned
      3) Poisonous soil
      4) Not nearly enough CO2 partial pressure in the atmosphere even if it wasn't so thin any plant would dessicate in minutes anyway.

      The whole thing is sci-fi dreamer BS.

  • Why over complicate things? Sure in that documentary Matt Damon just grew potatoes in his own shit.

    • ... just grew potatoes in his own shit

      Which sort of is exactly what you want to do. Composting your own manure and using it to provide food for the plants is a no-brainer. But still the environment is so radically different that you would want to protect your crop from cold, radiation, etc. And bringing fertile soil from earth is way too complicated.

    • Matt Damon just grew potatoes in his own shit.

      He grew tatties in his own shit INSIDE an engineered habitat. And it's the habitat which the aerogels are meant to reproduce, at least in part.

  • You haven't even explored earth. Now you claim there is absolutely nothing on mars, with just a few drone vists on the planet, and you decide to change its atmosphere. Yet if one day another life forms comes to terraform your planet, you will feel bad and get all emotional that some "evil" shit is terraforming our planet. Spend the time learning the Mars well first.

    • You haven't even explored earth. Now you claim there is absolutely nothing on mars, with just a few drone vists on the planet, and you decide to change its atmosphere. Yet if one day another life forms comes to terraform your planet, you will feel bad and get all emotional that some "evil" shit is terraforming our planet. Spend the time learning the Mars well first.

      If someone comes to terraform Earth then no doubt we will have something to say about it. No Martian has even popped out to say hello, fuck 'em.

  • > The aerogel sheets do not solve all of the problems but they could help future spacefarers create fertile oases on desolate planets where plants and other photosynthesizing organisms can take root. Because life would only grow beneath the sheets, the risk of contaminating the rest of Mars with foreign lifeforms would be minimal

    While quoting Jeff Goldblum can be embarrassing, "life finds a way". Micro-organisms and small, hardy creatures with short lifecycles evolve quckly, and unexpectedly. Unless such

    • And if it's not airproof and waterproof everything inside will die, the speed of that death proportional to the loss of air and water.

      This is where aerogels make minimal sense. They're fragile. I'd really like to see the engineering calculations behind using them like this. What do the models show for the propagation of cracks? If we model a meteor punching a hole through one or an explosion inside one temporarily increasing the air pressure, what happens? How do they react to the internal pressure changes

    • Not that any of these schemes is remotely practical, given that we are decades away from even pioneering landings and no effective work being done to land at all, but - who cares, anyway? Contaminate what? It's worthless as is.

    • It would be fairly pointless to worry about contaminating Mars with foreign life while also trying to farm it. Pick one or the other...

  • ....try it on Earth first. Hint: it won't work for a myriad of issues. Just because you have an idea doesn't make you a "scientist".

  • So, where are they going to get the air on Mars, which doesn't have anything like Earth's air?

    • It's formed by a supercritical CO2 process, air isn't required other than it just flows in after processing. I assume on Mars the aerogel would just "fill" with Martian atmosphere. As others have said though, given the expense and other materials I doubt this would be the best method, certainly some plastics would work just as well or better. If the plants need any sort of pressure to grow you'll need a very substantial structure to withstand the stresses.

  • is sort of like "solid smoke" and has similar mechanical properties- low mass, great thermal insulation, and essentially zero physical strength. How are you going to use something with zero strength to protect/enclose anything?

    • Exactly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Thud457 ( 234763 )
      Easy the genetically engineered bacteria that excrete the aerogel reduce the cell spacing, increasing the density as they progress up a gravitational gradient. The real problem is a runaway chain reaction that turns the whole Martian atmosphere into aerogel with an impenetrable outer shell that keeps the Earthmen out.

    • You ignore that part. You also ignore the fact that you'd need to be making these on Mars, and thus you'd need to bring over the all of the industrial manufacturing for them that we don't currently have along with the gas that's going to fill the pores and all the raw materials. Unless we are also setting up industrial mining and refining on Mars too.

      But if you can ignore all of that, this is an excellent plan!

      • What gas to fill the pores? You don't really want gas to fill the pores because it conducts heat. On Earth you kind of have no other choice because of the atmosphere, but on Mars, that's much less of a problem.

        • What gas to fill the pores?

          I think you need to revise what aerogels are. They are gels of solids in gas. The gas has close to the ambient pressure, so on Mars it would be about 0.006bar of CO2, but it's still there.

          Actually, that suggests a set of experiments that would be on the agenda. Which the authors clearly understand. FTFP :

          Silica aerogels, which consist of nanoscale networks of interconnecting silica clusters, are over 97% air by volume and have some of the lowest measured thermal conductivities of

  • Should humans ever decide to spread beyond Earth, as the late Stephen Hawking declared we must,

    Well then, that settles it. If St Stephen says we must, then we must! I've reserved my space on the B ark.

  • The sheets could be laid directly on the ground

    And when it blows away in one of the regular dust storms?
    With something as light and insubstantial as this, how do the researchers plan to keep it in place.

  • Aerogel will remain expensive through most of your lifetime. It will likely become cheap enough to make picnic coolers out of, but the idea of using it for farming isn't financially realistic.
  • On Mars there could be no weeds, no mice, no pesticides. Food brought from Mars could be sold as ecological.
  • I think reusing Passenger Flights to spray Silicon dioxide/Table salt on Clouds is better;
  • cuzzz the risk of contaminating the rest of Mars with foreign lifeforms would be minimal. doesn't seem anyone down here cares about contaminating anything down here which = lol
  • Enabling Martian habitability with silica aerogel via the solid-state greenhouse effect [arxiv.org]
    authors R. Wordsworth, L. Kerber, C. Cockell
    Cockell (at UK Centre for Astrobiology, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, UK) does several courses on Coursera in astrobiology, astronomical instrumentation etc. Interesting stuff, which I hadn't noticed from the initial write-up.
  • Enabling Martian habitability with silica aerogel via the solid-state greenhouse effect [arxiv.org]
    authors R. Wordsworth, L. Kerber, C. Cockell
    Chris Cockell (at UK Centre for Astrobiology, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, UK) does several courses on Coursera in astrobiology, astronomical instrumentation etc. Interesting stuff, which I hadn't noticed from the initial write-up.

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