There is not enough CO2 for Terraformer Mars

Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform in our planetary home away from home – even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole.

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 fine atmosphere is made of this substance, and the white substance that we often see on the surface is dry ice and not snow. CO ₂ is even trapped in rocks and soil.

This abundance has long fueled the visions of a fantastic future where all this trapped gas is released, creating a thicker atmosphere that warms the planet. The founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has even suggested to Mars to make this happen.

But in this new study, the seasoned expert Bruce Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards available to terraform the red planet. They combined the observations of Martian CO ₂ of various missions – the NASA atmospheric probe MAVEN, the Mars Express orbiter of the European Space Agency, as well as the Odyssey from NASA and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results cast a shadow over the dreams of the futurists

Terraforming Schemes

The article looks at two approaches that have been discussed. In the first case, humans simply increase the atmospheric pressure of Mars until space settlers can move with a respirator instead of the full pressure combination of astronauts used in exits. in the space. The other scenario aims to create an atmosphere that allows liquid water to surface and air almost breathable.

Both scenarios require a lot of CO ₂ . And … there is just not enough. The polar ice caps are in fact shallow deposits of carbon dioxide, and even depleting all of Mars' existing CO resources still creates only 15 millibars of atmospheric pressure – on Earth, about 1000 millibars is considered as average pressure at sea level. Even the vaporization of Mars's carbon-rich sedimentary rocks, laid when the red planet was watery, would produce only 12 millibars. None of the scenarios studied by scientists could make a difference, even considering unlikely conditions like creating an artificial magnetic field.

Mars is a cold desert and almost devoid of air, and it seems likely that it will remain so.

This may not affect the plans of a pressurized Martian base, but it makes the idea of ​​actually colonizing Mars a lot less appealing. And while some future ideas like redirecting comets could bring more gas and water to Mars, they are far beyond our current means.

Sorry, Elon Musk.

This article was published on Discovermagazine.com.