Scientists develop materials to create living areas on Mars

The surface of Mars, as far as we can judge, is not habitable for man – it is far too cold. But eventually, humanity would like to install an outpost on the planet. It will take a bit of warming, but how?

Scientists now propose to use an insulating material called silica airgel to make certain parts of the Martian surface more related to photosynthetic life, plants. This in no way suggests a global terraform project, but an airgel cover could more easily melt water from the Martian ice caps to make a small part of the planet habitable for long-term visitors. term, whether human or plant.

"What's good is that the other ways of turning a planet into terraform are so far apart," Laura Kerber, researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Gizmodo. Far from radical sciences, silica aerogels are an evolutionary technology already existing.

Humans have already demonstrated that they are good enough to warm the planets, thanks to the greenhouse effect, which is the moment when a material (carbon dioxide, for example) absorbs sunlight for re-blunt it, keeping the area underheated. . But it's impossible to heat an entire planet this way. Past results have already shown that there is not enough carbon dioxide on Mars to turn it into modern technology. The researchers focused on how they could heat small areas of the surface with the least possible effort, for example for a research outpost.

Silica airgel would induce the greenhouse effect. It is a material consisting mainly of air by volume, trapped by a network of silicon dioxide. Thanks to its properties, a thick layer of a few centimeters can transmit the visible light that a plant would use for photosynthesis, block harmful ultraviolet rays and warm the area below.

The team developed an experimental device in which it projected an approximately Martian light level on the gel and measured a difference of more than 50 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) between the top and bottom. Such a material could therefore be useful for increasing the soil temperature in the region around the Martian poles. Kerber proposed to produce tiles of this material that could be assembled in a greenhouse-like structure.

A researcher who did not participate in the study thought it was a "smart" and "potentially interesting" idea. Bruce Jakosky, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Gizmodo that it was not at all "terraforming," as other media have already said. The researchers suggest instead to heat a region enough to melt the ice. In their article published in Nature Astronomy, the team stated that there remain other important life constraints that such a greenhouse would not have to overcome, such as the appropriate atmospheric pressure. In addition, Kerber pointed out that silica airgel is very fragile and that it should be doped with another material, for example a polymer.

But even before thinking of transforming part of the Martian surface to make it habitable for humanity, there are a ton of other things to consider. The simple fact of establishing a base on Mars raises the question of who should go and why, and Mars could have its own life, which the presence of Earthlings (human, plant or microbial) would complicate research. Kerber herself pointed out that terraforming the planet would destroy the "virgin" environment that scientists want to explore.

Terraformer Mars is probably a bad idea. "It's dangerous," said Jakosky. "This suggests that we do not have to worry about maintaining an environment here on Earth. It's not a good concept. But perhaps building a smaller structure would allow researchers to perform experiments without any potentially bad results.

In the end, this is a research of principle, and a human settlement on Mars remains an idea of ​​the distant and speculative future. But for now, researchers hope to test their materials in harsh environments on Earth, Antarctica or Chile. And unlike the speculative technology needed to transform an entire planet, building a greenhouse from an existing material does not seem so difficult.