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Terraforming Mars Could Be Easier Than Scientists Thought
Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests...
The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests... Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Still, "Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance," says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work.
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