Scientists want to sprinkle engineered dust particles across the Martian atmosphere, warming it up so that it could be made habitable.
The groundbreaking idea is one of a number of revolutionary ways that scientists have proposed to terraform Mars, so that it could be made more like Earth and perhaps even serve as a home for humans.
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At the moment, the Martian surface is inhospitable: it is punishingly cold, blasted by deadly UV rays, the soil is salty, the air is thin, and there is no evidence that anything currently lives there.
The new method is more than 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes, the scientists behind it say.
It makes use of resources that are easily available on Mars – rather than requiring us to transport materials from our planet, or digging them out of the Martian ground.
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Researchers warn that the proposal would take decades to actually work. But many other proposals could be impossible because of the vast amount of work required to make them happen.
The first proposals for terraforming Mars started in the early 1970s. In the 50 years since, researchers have suggested a host of different ways of making it more like Earth, none of which have got off the ground.
The researchers suggest that their new proposal is worthy of further research because it suggests that the work required to warm Mars enough to allow for liquid water is less than we might think.
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It is a little like the greenhouse effect that we suffer with on Earth. Other proposals have suggested doing that with gases brought to Mars, or with complex mining on the planet itself.
The new proposal takes the iron and aluminium that appears to be common on Mars, and engineering dust particles into short rods, the same size as pieces of glitter. those rods would trap heat as it escaped, and scattered sunlight onto the surface, creating a greenhouse.
“You’d still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” said Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and corresponding author on the study. “This significantly increases the feasibility of the project.”
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That would not be enough to allow humans to live on Mars without changing the air itself. But it could be enough to start growing microbes and then food crops, the researchers suggest – and those in turn could add oxygen into the atmosphere and make it more available for human habitation.
The study, ‘Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles’, is published in the journal Science Advances.
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