• Question: Is it possible to make an atmosphere on mars to make it habitable for humans?

    Asked by sophiewest to Catherine, Adam, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by igloo23, littlechatterbox, tonieastup123, nazia1999, emmam.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Good question.

      There are a lot of theories about this.

      The idea is basically that if we could make the atmosphere slightly thicker, it would start to warm the whole planet up and release more gas, making the atmosphere even thicker, and so on.

      There’s lots of carbon dioxide locked away in ice at the polar caps, so if we could release some of that it would act as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

      Lots of different ways of doing this, all with different levels of difficulty.

      We could just take a load of heaters and put them in the ice – this would need a lot of power.

      We could redirect an asteroid or comet so that it impacted into one of the poles, releasing carbon dioxide – we would need to land on a comet, put rockets on it, /and/ be able to steer it accurately!

      Some people think we could genetically engineer some bugs to do the job for us, releasing them on Mars – but we don’t really know how to do this yet.

      The big question would be how far away Mars is from what we could call the equilibrium point – the thickness the atmosphere would need to be to start making it thicker on it’s own. It could be a long way away, meaning we would have to put a lot of effort into this, or it might be very close, meaning we only had to do something very small to start a change.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Adam knows more than me about this, but if we were able to get plants or other bugs to survive on Mars, I read that it would take at least 100 years of them pumping out oxygen and water to get to that point where it can keep it going by itself.

      I reckon that by the time we’ve engineered some plants that can do that, we will have worked out a way to get there ourselves, so we could send people to build a martian base, and they can go outside occasionally to tend to the Mars-plants. Imagine the amazing day when they can take the roof off the Mars base and breathe fresh air for the first time in hundreds of years…

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