Rehabilitating Mars

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="4">Rehabilitating Mars</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted Feb. 9, 2005<br> Courtesy American Geophysical Union<br> and World Science Staff</font> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><br> <br> Introducing global warming on Mars may be the best way to warm the planet’s frozen landscape and turn it into a liveable world in the future, a team of scientists says.<br> <br> The researchers propose that injecting a type of gas known as “super” greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could raise the planet’s temperature enough to do the trick. This would melt its polar ice caps and create conditions suitable for life.<br> <br> Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Scientists consider them the major cause of global warming on Earth.<br> <br> Margarita Marinova, who was with the NASA Ames Research Center when she conducted the studies, and colleagues propose that the same types of atmospheric interactions that have led to recent surface temperature warming trends on Earth could be harnessed on Mars to create another biologically hospitable environment in the solar system. <br> <br> The researchers, writing in the February issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, argued that their method would be more effective than previously mentioned alternatives, like <br> like sprinkling sunlight-absorbing dust on the poles or placing large mirrors in the planet’s orbit.<br> <br> “Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapt and proliferate on other worlds,” Marinova said. “Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further.”<br> <br> The authors noted that artificially created gases—which would be nearly 10,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas on Earth—could be manufactured to harm living things only minimally. <br> <br> They created a computer model of the Martian atmosphere and analyzed four such gases, individually and in combination, that are considered the best candidates for the job.<br> <br> Their study focused on fluorine-based gases, composed of elements readily available on the Martian surface, that are known to be effective at absorbing infrared heat energy. They found that a compound known as octafluoropropane, whose chemical formula is C3F8, produced the greatest warming, while its combination with several similar gases enhanced the warming even further.<br> <br> The researchers anticipate that adding a tiny amount of the gas mixture in the current Martian atmosphere would spark a runaway greenhouse effect, creating an instability in the polar ice sheets that would slowly evaporate the frozen carbon dioxide on the planet’s surface. <br> <br> They added that the release of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide would lead to further melting and global temperature increases that could then enhance atmospheric pressure and eventually restore a thicker atmosphere to the planet.<br> <br> Such a process could take centuries or even millennia to complete but, because the raw materials for the fluorine gases already exist on Mars, it is possible that astronauts could create them on a manned mission to the planet. It would otherwise be impossible to deliver the required quantities of the gas to Mar, the authors said.  </font> </p> </b> </body>