• Question: do you think its possible that if a group of austronauts went to mars and burnt fossil fuels there do you think that they could create global warming on mars?????

    Asked by tonieastup123 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      It’s not such a crazy idea. There probably wouldn’t be enough to do very much, but it might help us in the long run by warming Mars up so that we could live there!

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      They would have to take a lot of fossil fuel with them! Too much for one spaceship to carry

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      We would need to release an awful amount of gases on Mars to make it have a thick enough atmosphere for global warming. But I suspect this could happen in the future – if we wanted to live on Mars it might just be possible to do this and make another habitable planet in the solar system. A bit beyond us right now, but not totally crazy.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Yes they could, but there is already a huge amount of carbon dioxide (the gas we worry contributes most to global warming on Earth) there. To really warm up Mars, you will need special gases that we manufacture in chemical plants, perhaps like HFCs.

      Perhaps even water, which is a really good greenhouse gas. It has been suggested that “burning up” comets in the Martian atmosphere is one way to make it wet and put greenhouse gases into it.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Well for a start, even getting astronauts to Mars would be years and years in the future because we don’t have the technology yet to send a spaceship away for that long.
      But it is possible that you could create global warming on mars by burning carbon-based fuels (though you’d have to take them with you because Mars has never had the living creatures on it that created the fossil fuels on Earth), because burning them will create carbon dioxide which will go into the atmosphere and create a greenhouse effect and warm the planet.
      In the case of mars though, global warming wouldn’t be too bad a thing, because at the moment it has barely any atmosphere, and the surface is really very cold. If people were to want to go there to live, we’d have to find a way of creating an atmosphere and warming up the surface, although burning fossil fuels wouldn’t be the best way to do that – plants can do it too and are much more eco-friendly!

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