Sorry, Elon Musk: NASA says Mars terraforming plans will not work

Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk told Stephen Colbert his late guest, that he hoped to use thermonuclear explosions to revive the creation of a Martian atmosphere likely to support the life. But new research supported by NASA finds that even nuking the red planet will not be enough to convert it to another Earth.

The basic idea for making Mars habitable, also known as terraforming, is to release enough carbon. the dioxide trapped in the surface of the planet to thicken the atmosphere, heating the planet enough to maintain the water in the liquid state. It's literally the same greenhouse effect that is also driving climate change on our planet right now.

"Carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor (H2O) are the only greenhouse gases likely to be present on Mars in sufficient abundance to provide a significant warming of greenhouses" said Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Jakosky is the main author of a new study published Monday in Nature Astronomy that concludes that there is simply not enough of these gases trapped on Mars to do the job . The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than one percent of that of the Earth, which would probably be necessary to raise temperatures sufficient for stable liquid water.

Even though Musk was able to melt the polar ice caps with nuclear technology, the new research indicates that they would only release enough CO2 to bring the atmospheric pressure to 1.2 percent of the Earth.

"Moreover, most of the CO2 gas is not accessible and can not be easily mobilized, which makes the terraforming of Mars impossible with the help of current technology," he said. said Jakosky.

The badysis shows that even going through a process of extracting energy-intensive CO2 from the dust, soils and minerals of the planet, the atmosphere reaches only about 5% of what it needs to be.

reply to a request for comment sent to SpaceX

The surface features on Mars suggest that the planet was formerly warmer and wetter, but searches conducted since March on these spacecraft have shown that a much of the atmosphere of the planet the moisture has been lost in space in ancient times.

That does not necessarily mean that the dream of living on Mars is dead, but it suggests that the most important industry of the red planet could sell and maintain reliable spatial combinations

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