Amid plans for humans to explore and colonize Mars, NASA scientists have proposed a plan that can make the Red Planet habitable.
Magnetic Shield To Protect The Planet From Solar Wind
Scientists proposed launching a magnetic shield into space to protect the planet from solar wind. Doing this may help restore the Martian atmosphere and terraform its environment so liquid water would once again flow on its surface.
Scientists working at the U.S. space agency think that launching a sufficiently powerful magnetic shield into space could serve as a replacement for the Red Planet's own lost magnetosphere, the natural shield that prevents charged particles from reaching the surface of a planet.
Mars's atmosphere is believed to have been damaged by solar winds that destroyed 90 percent of the layer that gave the planet its water and temperate climate more than 3 billion years ago.
Researchers said that an artificially created magnetic shield may speed up the restoration of the Red Planet's atmosphere, which could eventually help make Mars more habitable for future human explorers and colonizers.
"Much like Earth, an enhanced atmosphere would: allow larger landed mass of equipment to the surface, shield against most cosmic and solar particle radiation, extend the ability for oxygen extraction, and provide 'open air' greenhouses to exist for plant production, just to name a few," said NASA's Planetary Science Division director Jim Green and colleagues in a report. "If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonization of Mars would not be far away."
The concept may be promising but it is not the only idea that scientists and entrepreneurs have considered in a bid to send humans to Mars.
Injecting Greenhouse Gases Into Mars's Thin Atmosphere
Scientists have mulled on the idea of injecting planet-warming gases into the Red Planet's thin atmosphere. In a 2005 study, for example, researchers found that adding artificially created gases 10,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide into the Martian air could trigger a greenhouse effect. Jumpstarting global warming in the planet would affect its temperature and melt water ice and carbon dioxide ice.
When frozen water becomes liquid, it would break down latent peroxides and release oxygen into the atmosphere. The initial amount of oxygen that would be released may not be enough to sustain human life but this is enough to grow plants that could boost the supply of oxygen in the planet.
Dropping Thermonuclear Bombs
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has earlier expressed his intention to bring people to the Red Planet, also has an idea that could terraform Mars. He said that dropping thermonuclear bombs on the ice at the planet's pole could transform the arid world into an Earth-like planet. Some scientists said that the idea of nuking Mars to make it habitable is not as crazy as it may seem.
"Exploding bombs on Mars would be perfectly possible, but I don't know what effect it will have. I don't know a lot of about nuclear weapons, but they do have side effects like radiation," said the director of the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications Malcolm Macdonald.
